Connubium
by eldritcher
Summary: Dumbledore doesn't want an entire generation to die in the wars to come. Voldemort is tired of plotting in the cold. So they make a peace-pact and tie it down with marriage. Free, Harry goes and lives his life (or tries to).
1. How much less man

Nobody knew what Firenze had told Dumbledore. All they knew was the Headmaster seemed uncertain of his plans, of their plans, afterwards.

It had shaken Harry to see Dumbledore unsure. He hated Firenze for having wrought that. Dumbledore's unwavering conviction about their cause had been the sole constant in Harry's world.

"We will wage this war for years," Dumbledore said quietly.

The Order, gathered there, watched him.

"Yes," Minerva McGonagall spoke up. "We are prepared."

"Are we?" Dumbledore asked. "I wonder now."

There, again, was uncertainty in his gaze.

Hermione's hand came to grip Harry's in fear. He moved his arm about her, gathering her to his side and giving a comforting squeeze. Ron would have been a better candidate to comfort her, and certainly she would have preferred that, but Ron was seated with Fred and George across the table, and Harry was used to being a stand-in for him.

"What are you concerned about?" Remus asked, calm and reassuring as always.

Dumbledore knit his fingers together and rested his chin upon them. Then he looked at Harry directly. Did he think that Harry was not ready? Dumbledore's gaze moved from him to the man seated by Minerva. Snape.

"There will be sacrifices that are required of us," Dumbledore said softly. "I wonder-" he exhaled. "I wonder if there is an easier means to our ends."

Kingsley was the first to catch on. Voice deep with alarm, he asked, "Surely you cannot mean to come to an armistice?"

"We open negotiations," Dumbledore said evenly. "Nothing was ever lost by an attempt at negotiations. At the worst, we will be where we are now."

—-

Harry paced outside the door to Dumbledore's office, treading in a circle over and over again. He could hear raised voices. He winced as Snape's cutting tones reached his ears, strident and sharp over Dumbledore's soft-spoken words.

"Come in!" Dumbledore called out then, and Harry wondered, as he always did, how Dumbledore was omniscient at Hogwarts.

He entered and nodded to Snape. Snape glowered back.

"I do think that the two of you have rarely been so at accord," Dumbledore said jovially, waving Harry to a seat and pouring him tea.

"What did Firenze tell you?" Harry asked, somehow instinctively sure that the centaur's words held the key to Dumbledore's sudden reversal of position.

"Mars is high up above us," Dumbledore said, looking out through the high windows to the star-studded skies. There, indeed, forbidding and red shone the red planet above the treeline of the Forbidden Forest.

"What?" Harry asked, confused, looking to Snape for help. Snape was of no help, choosing to ignore Harry entirely and instead trading scowls with Phineas's portrait.

"There are only two ways to end this war," Dumbledore said softly, looking at Harry, and then looking at Snape, with such sadness writ on his face. "There is only one way to win the war."

"Each of us in this room knows the cost," Snape replied, preternaturally calm as he clasped his hands. "We know we may very well not survive. It is too late to back out, Albus. We are close, finally, to ridding the world of him."

"Are we?" Dumbledore asked, as if rhetorically.

Harry frowned in worry. They had been dealing with the Horcruxes. They were close. Harry knew that. He knew that from Dumbledore's withered hand, from the diary's last scream when he had pierced it with the Basilisk fang, from the riskier and riskier espionages that Snape undertook to unearth information about what remained.

"He is not worried," Dumbledore continued, still looking at the stars. "Harry has not sensed any turbulence."

"He has been parted from them for a very long time," Snape said dismissively. "Very likely that he is not aware, yet."

"He shields all the time," Harry pointed out, awkwardly supporting Snape's argument. "I don't slip into his mind at all these days, during my dreams."

"Can we take the chance?" Dumbledore wondered. "We must all fall to bring him down. I don't care for my life, as you well know. Yet, how can I gamble with yours? How can I gamble your lives on the meagre hope that it will be sufficient?"

"It has to be," Harry said firmly, trying to put the full force of his conviction into his words. "You have studied him for years. You know our chances are better than meagre."

"Perhaps," Dumbledore smiled at him. "What do we lose by asking him to negotiate? His supporters are few. His alliances have not materialised as he hoped. He is in a weaker position than he expected to be. His most loyal followers are either dead or considerably weakened by long imprisonment. He knows we have been preparing for years."

"You underestimate his ingenuity," Snape said sourly. "This isn't the first time he is building from nothing."

"A very long exile, deprived of body and aid," Dumbledore said thoughtfully. "While he is an ingenious man, I think even he must be tired."

James and Lily had died protecting Harry. Sirius had died to protect Harry. He stared at Dumbledore, wanting him to smile and admit that it was only a fool's hope, that they would carry on with their carefully crafted plans of war and sacrifice to destroy the madman who held their world in his clutches.

—-

Griselda Marchbanks drafted the treaty. The first draft was sent to Lucius Malfoy, who had been busy spending a great amount of money and influence to convince Fudge that Voldemort had not returned. Little wonder that he did not take the proposal seriously. There was no reply.

Harry hoped that would be the end of it. Dumbledore's persistence prevailed though. The next draft received a response, curt and not impolite.

"Dear me, dear me," Dumbledore said sweetly, reading through the contents. "He does seem eager enough to consider our proposals."

Snape, peering over his shoulder, coughed and said, "He has only revised one hundred and ninety two of the two hundred points."

"He was fine with the remaining eight," Dumbledore said, full of cheer.

"Those were about lowering the price of contraceptive medicine and increasing the permitted times for firecrackers during wizarding holidays," Snape muttered. "I doubt he cares a whit about either matter."

"At least he has no moral compunction about contraception," Dumbledore pointed out.

Snape wisely did not reply. Harry hoped that would be the end of it. Surely, the disagreement on the draft should be sufficient reason to drop the idea.

It went on and on, with neither Dumbledore nor Voldemort feeling particularly inclined to compromise on anything. Their wins were marginal and their losses considerable. Harry wondered why they bothered.

"What about the greater good?" Snape asked Dumbledore.

"Is it not relative?" Dumbledore wondered. "The greatest good is absolute. The greater good, one may argue, is relative in both temporal and moral dimensions."

—-

"It does look as if neither of them are ready to start the war," Ron pointed out, as they walked together back from Hogsmeade.

Harry wondered if that was true.

"It could be that they don't have the same concept of time we do," Hermione said then. "They have lived so long that our months are their days."

Harry supposed that could be the case. Neither of them were impatient, he knew. They were good at biding their time.

And then Dumbledore called Harry to him.

"We have agreed upon the terms," the Headmaster said without preface. He looked content as if he had reached his desired end.

"Did he compromise?" Harry asked curiously.

He did not think Voldemort to be the compromising sort. On the other hand, Dumbledore could be unflinchingly stubborn too.

"We arrived at an acceptable middle ground," Dumbledore told him happily. "The terms will be published in the newspapers."

"Just like that?" Harry asked, shocked. "What if he breaks his word?"

"There is a way to enforce it," Dumbledore chided him. "I wouldn't dare accept the truce without a means to enforce it."

Then his expression moved from relief to caution.

"What should I do?" Harry asked, knowing that expression well. Dumbledore had wanted to save Harry's life, to save Snape's life. It must have cost something.

"Nothing at all."

"There is something you aren't telling me about," Harry said. "What is it?"

"A marriage of sorts," Dumbledore said. "To bind us."

"A marriage?" Harry asked, squishing down the immediate revulsion but failing to keep it out of his voice.

"A technicality," Dumbledore said comfortingly. "As I said, I care little for my life. Don't fret about it, Harry."

"He agreed?" Harry asked, horrified by the thought of it.

And then he had to put out weird images of pale white pressed against gnarly wrinkles. He had been unlucky enough to see Voldemort step out of that cauldron. He had been unlucky enough to see Dumbledore sunbathing by the lake in the summer.

"It is only signatures," Dumbledore said. "Ancient practices in both the Muggle and the wizarding world. You seal a truce with a marriage. It is only a pact holding both parties in binding. He knows, just as I do, that there is nothing else to it."

"He agreed to marry you?" Harry asked, unable to hold in his shock still. "Why?"

"It is only a signature," Dumbledore explained again. "Certainly less arduous than planning a war. He must be tired of fighting. I have no desire to see Severus or you die, to see young men and women die instead of living their lives."

"Um, all right," Harry said numbly, at a loss for words. He sat down in the nearest armchair and stared at Dumbledore.

There, again, was that uncertainty on the Headmaster's features.

"What else?" Harry pressed on.

"Well, I shall not outlive him," Dumbledore said thoughtfully, looking at his withered hand. "These pacts expire a decade or so after the death of a spouse. We will still need a way to keep the pact afterwards. I believe it may not be necessary, as long as he is not denied what he wants: power and glory."

"Can he heal your arm? It was his bloody curse, in the first place."

"It is irreversible."

Dumbledore had hatched the plan to keep Harry and Snape alive, to prevent countless casualties of war on either side, to keep their economy intact, to leave Hogwarts unharmed, and for many other noble reasons. He had made progress with the negotiations, unexpectedly, remarkably. He was willing to marry Voldemort for their peace.

"The next time we meet, we should discuss more pleasant matters," Dumbledore said jovially. "What will a fine, young man like you pursue? Will you travel the world? Will you court Ginerva? Will you build a home? Will you join the Aurors?"

And Harry realised, seeing the love in Dumbledore's bright, blue eyes, that the Headmaster was glad to spare them the war. He desired peace enough to put the relative above the absolute.

—

Harry joined Puddlemere United as their seeker. Hermione went to work for Arthur at the Ministry. Ron slipped into helping Fred and George at their shop.

Remus was back to teaching Defence at Hogwarts. Harry sometimes wondered how he managed to get along with Snape. Hogwarts was large enough for two men to remain in perpetual avoidance, Remus told him. Then again, after the marriage, Snape had mellowed down, and had taken to his roost in the dungeons with glee, spending a great deal of research funding on pointless ventures. Harry suspected this was Snape's idea of fun.

Voldemort eased into the Ministry and rewarded his followers mightily. No further word was spoken of that infamous Muggle-born massacre he had been scheming for years about. There was segregation to a greater extent, Hermione said, but it was selectively employed to make sure that no magical child was left in peril with Muggle parents, or so the Ministry claimed. Harry did not know but he decided to trust Dumbledore's judgement.

And wonder of wonders, the marriage that released their yokes from the war stayed unshaken. Harry had not expected it to last more than a few days, but both the participants seemed equally keen to keep it strong, seeing that it served their ends.

Dumbledore continued whatever long running dalliance he pursued with Minerva McGonagall, taking her regularly to events and festivals despite the press coverage that it resulted in. Nobody complained too loudly.

Voldemort's public appearances were rare, but whenever he made one, Dumbledore avoided the event. Harry supposed they must have some way of coordinating to make sure that they were never in each other's company.

As far as marriages went, it was turning out to be a resounding success.


	2. What do you see?

((We are moving towards Harry/Voldemort, slowly.))

* * *

"The Quidditch Cup!" Arthur exclaimed happily. "We have a fighting chance at it this year!"

Harry was excited too.

The press, on the other hand, was clamouring about the fact that this would be the first time that Voldemort and Dumbledore would make a joint appearance.

Harry received a letter from Dumbledore, requesting a favour, requesting if he would mind accompanying Minerva to the opening ceremony. He did not mind at all. A part of him was sad for his Head of House. He was sure that she would have preferred Dumbledore's company.

—

Harry had forgotten how skeletally thin Voldemort was. Sitting in the large chair beside Dumbledore, he was only a pale shadow in his customary black muted by Dumbledore's sparkling green and fuchsia robes. They were managing very well to sit beside each other without sharing a single word or glance.

The box was filling up slowly. There was Rufus Scrimgeour, and then Griselda. Voldemort rose to greet Griselda and escorted her to her seat, reminding Harry rather strongly of Tom Riddle. When Minerva entered, on Harry's arm, Voldemort decided to return to his seat and look at the crowds. Dumbledore looked up and beamed at them, waving them over. Minerva hesitated, but Harry led her down.

"Ah, Harry!" Dumbledore said cheerfully, patting him on the arm, and then turning his attention to Minerva to kiss her. Harry looked away just as Voldemort looked up. Harry realised that they had not seen each other after the confrontation in the Ministry in his fifth year.

Lucius Malfoy came then, with his wife. Voldemort rose to his feet again to greet Narcissa warmly.

"As lovely a sight as always," he said charmingly.

She smiled and then looked to Harry. Harry returned her smile and said awkwardly, "Mrs. Malfoy."

"Draco is a fan of your team," she said graciously.

Her son had entered the Ministry, working in foreign affairs. Harry missed their old rivalry at times. Yet, he was glad that they did not have to face each other on a battlefield, knowing that they would have to kill or be killed. The marriage had saved them from that. It had condemned Draco to a boring Ministry job and it had brought Harry freedom. Lovely, really.

"Ah, Harry, I wonder if I might ask you to take my seat until the ceremonies begin?" Dumbledore asked then, cheerfully.

Minerva looked unsure and out of place. Harry glanced at Voldemort, who had gone back to chatting with Narcissa about the weather. He shrugged and nodded. Dumbledore smiled and then escorted Minerva to her seat, merrily chatting with her and putting her at ease. Voldemort saw Narcissa to her seat and then returned to sit beside Harry. They remained in silence for a while and Harry's nails dug into his hands from stress.

"Professional Quidditch?" Voldemort finally asked.

"The Daily Prophet talks about it all the time," Harry muttered, still reluctant to look at the man.

"I don't read the newspapers often," Voldemort replied.

"They talk about you all the time," Harry said wryly, daring to look up at the man finally.

"Precisely the reason why I stopped reading the news," Voldemort told him. Their eyes met for a fraction, before Voldemort looked away. He said in a quieter tone, "I expected to see you join the Aurors."

"It wasn't for me," Harry admitted. He wondered why he was willing to discuss it.

"Harry," Dumbledore said then, coming over to them. "The ceremony is to start soon, however. The Minister's spouse must be beside the Minister."

Voldemort turned away to engage Griselda in conversation and Harry rose to relinquish the seat to Dumbledore.

Throughout the ceremony, Harry watched them avoid engaging each other in conversation, or even making eye-contact. It did not look awkward. It was only two men who had reached their ends through a pact. Voldemort had the power he desired without having to rebuild alliances and repair loyalties, without having to risk his life. Dumbledore had the peace he desired without having to sacrifice lives or his strongest principles for it.

Later, at the dinner, he watched them circulate, separately, meeting and greeting officials and royals from different countries. Harry looked at them in fascination and finished his third glass of wine. Then he was accosted by Viktor Krum.

As they stood there chatting about Hermione, Harry sensed Voldemort's gaze on them. He wondered if Voldemort was looking at him. Was Voldemort curious about why Harry had chosen a life away from both Hogwarts and the Ministry?

—-

Harry was appointed the referee for the final match between Bulgaria and Britain. The Prophet cast insinuations about his celebrity status being the motivation behind his selection. Ron was riled up on Harry's behalf, but Harry could not bring himself to care.

He was standing in the corridor leading to the changing rooms, waiting for the teams to enter the pitch. He was to enter the pitch after them. The walls reverberated with the cheers of the thousands of fans gathered in the stands. Then Dumbledore came by, looking grumpy.

"What is it?" Harry asked Dumbledore.

"I wanted to attend the match, but Minerva sent a Patronus just now, insisting that we celebrate our anniversary," he explained. "Harry, you look dashing in your referee robes."

Harry thought that his robes of pink and blue looked terrible on him. Dumbledore's compliment only confirmed his worst fears.

Then Voldemort came out of an adjacent room that had the secure Floo. He was dusting his robes with a frown.

Dumbledore chuckled and asked, "I see your fondness for that fine method of transportation has not waxed with the years. Still fighting the bureaucrats in Transporation about making Apparation the official, secure method of travel?"

"It is quaint," Voldemort muttered. "It is not more secure than Apparation. Even Muggles could break into the protocol, once they have quantum computing."

Dumbledore said wryly, "That is unlikely to happen in this century. Moore's law."

They did not sound particularly out for each other's blood. Harry wondered if they had occasional conversations, every now and then.

"I disagree. While it is true that Moore's law is approaching its limits, quantum infrastructure will likely be based on nuclear magnetic resonance."

Harry blinked and looked at Dumbledore. He did not know what to make of the conversation at all.

"As much I would like to debate that, I have to leave now," Dumbledore replied. "Patriotism or requirement?"

"I am required to be present," Voldemort said tersely. "I have to wish our nation's champions good luck."

"Harry, take him to our team," Dumbledore told Harry. "I will see you at Molly's dinner next week."

So saying, he tipped his brightly coloured hat to both of them and made for the room with the Floo.

Harry looked at Voldemort.

"Introductions, then," Voldemort said, walking towards the changing rooms as another man might walk to the gallows.

The players were glad to see Harry. They greeted him boisterously. Harry grinned as he saw some of them bouncing on their feet, already experiencing the nervousness and adrenaline that came with big matches. This was going to be one of the biggest matches of their careers! And they were playing at home! They were watching Voldemort with varying degrees of alarm and concern. Voldemort was looking at Harry expectantly. Oh, introductions!

"Gentlemen," Voldemort said then, clearly having given up Harry to take the cue. "I wish you all the best in today's game. Britain is watching you. Make us proud. Make us proud to cheer you own for being fine sportsmen who uphold the values and traditions of our country."

He scoured up an encouraging smile from nowhere and then moved swiftly to shake hands with each of them.

The players looked surprised by Voldemort's attempt at motivation. Harry supposed that the words were great, and the delivery was less lackluster than he had expected.

"Um, yeah, good luck!" Harry wished them brightly. "I will see you on the pitch!"

The players took to that with a rousing cheer. Harry looked at Voldemort awkwardly, but the man had already curtly nodded to the team and was making his way out. Harry followed him.

"Where are the rest?"

"The rest?" Harry asked, confused. "The Bulgarian team?"

Voldemort frowned at him.

Oh! Harry said quietly, "There are only seven on a team."

He did not know whether to cry or laugh at the fact that Voldemort had decided once to conquer Wizarding Britain and spread pureblood propaganda without even understanding what the most popular sport of the nation involved. The huge PR machinery that had sprung into place at the Ministry after Voldemort's rise to power now made sense to Harry. Voldemort clearly needed it.

"Hmm, I am certain I must have been informed of that at some point," Voldemort said, sounding a little weary.

Harry glanced up at him. There was an expression on his face that Harry had often seen on Dumbledore's, of too much responsibility, of too much power, of too little lightness in life. That grounded Harry. Once he had thought that Dumbledore was untouchable by mundane matters such as world-weariness and tiredness, that the Headmaster had inexhaustible stores of energy. He had somehow associated Voldemort with the same qualities.

"I have to wait until the teams enter the pitch," Harry explained. "I think I will go wait in the room with the Floo. The stairs take you to the VIP boxes, if you are staying to watch the game."

"I am required to," Voldemort said listlessly. "Well, I have heard that you are an excellent flyer. I shall have the chance to witness your skills."

And then the Bulgarian team walked past them. Harry gave Krum a thumbs-up, but Krum's eyes were fixed on Voldemort.

—

"Remove your curse!" Dumbledore exclaimed. "Yes, you have made your point, consecutively, over the years. Now let the students have a consistent syllabus and a good teacher. Remus offers that!"

Harry wondered what he had walked into the middle of. Voldemort was standing by some of Dumbledore's spindly, glass instruments, looking at them with curiosity and a tinge of greed. Dumbledore was seated in his chair behind the large desk, and looked quite irritated. The portraits were taking bets with each other.

"Ah, Harry!" Dumbledore greeted him. "This shan't be more than a minute."

"I will wait outside, then?"

"No, stay, this is only a minor formality to make Remus permanent," Dumbledore said cheerfully.

"No," Voldemort said.

Dumbledore's eyes turned colder.

"He is a good teacher," Harry offered, feeling out of place. He wished that Dumbledore had asked him to leave.

"There are more qualified applicants for the position."

"You will not meddle in the affairs of the school!" Dumbledore said sharply. "Our accord dictates that clearly."

"Watch your words," Voldemort replied, his voice equally sharp. "If it pleases you to renew his appointment, do so."

"Remove the curse, _Tom_."

There was rage banked high in Voldemort's gaze then, flaring at the old name he despised. Harry's hand gripped his wand tightly, fearful. Dumbledore was standing up, and they glared daggers at each other, their usual masks of neutrality slipping fast. One of the spindly instruments by Voldemort's elbow burst into a thousand pieces, provoked by the whirling pool of wild magic and emotions in the room. Harry's scar flared in pain and his hands went up to cup it.

"You summoned me from London to discuss this," Voldemort hissed. "I thought you were dying. I shall be less forgiving should you call me for such a trivial concern again."

"Shall I then write letters to Lucius Malfoy to request an appointment with you, to remove a curse you maliciously, spitefully placed on the position?"

"You are my spouse," Voldemort said evenly, reining in his anger to provoke Dumbledore more. Harry inhaled sharply in surprise. "You require no middle-man to come and visit me."

"I am yoked to you for peace," Dumbledore told him calmly. "I am Minerva's spouse. Don't disgrace that word by associating it with what this is, by associating it with you."

"You haven't changed. Losing ruins your mask of benevolence," Voldemort replied. "I have matters to see to. Find a new teacher for next year. You will need to."

Saying that, he made for the door. Harry moved to let him pass, and smelled the faint scent of blood. He glanced at Dumbledore, but the Headmaster was busy cleaning up the glass shards carefully.

"Fetch Argus for me, will you, Harry?"

Harry nodded and left the room. His eyebrows went up when he saw Voldemort descending the stairs more slowly than was usual for him.

Harry caught up with him and asked, "My scar. Was it because you were angry?"

"Dumbledore is the resident expert on my horcruxes, isn't he?" Voldemort muttered, and Harry could smell blood strongly on him.

"I guess. I don't know everything about them, but I know what it is like to be one. My scar today…it felt like pain," Harry said quietly. "It didn't feel like anger. Trust me, I have experienced your rage enough through the scar to tell the difference."

"The glass shards pierced my skin," Voldemort said evenly. "Even Shylock bleeds."

Harry did not know what craziness was in him for saying what he said next. "Maybe you should go to the hospital wing."

Voldemort paused his steps and turned to look at him, with anger blooming on his features. Then it waned into confusion when he realised that Harry was speaking without mockery.

He said cautiously, "It is neither life-threatening nor impairing. It can wait until I return home."

Home.

Harry had left Hogwarts. While he attended the Sunday dinners at the Burrow, he did not stay there anymore. He dwelt in a tiny flat in Camden. He spent his weekends on the couch, watching television, drinking beer, eating curry, until he nodded off.

Somehow, Voldemort had managed to find home in that year. He had left behind Malfoy Manor and his father's house in Little Hangleton.

—  
Gringotts declared their wedding anniversary a bank holiday. The general public celebrated. Various brands came out with products somehow related to the wedding. Fred and George had a best-selling line of adult games tagged 'Make love, not war'.

Neither Dumbledore nor Voldemort cared. Voldemort refused to let the Ministry declare the day as a national holiday. Dumbledore was unreachable for comment, since he was off in sunny Bolivia, with Minerva McGonagall.

"They should!" Hermione said vehemently, punctuating her statement with a shake of her tequila glass, splashing some on Harry and Ron. "They really ought to. It is the biggest, most momentous, history-changing moment in contemporary times! The wedding is the only reason why we are out here, in a pub in Camden, watching football on the TV, instead of fighting for our lives as child-soldiers in a war that we had dismal chances of surviving."

"Mum's Weekly had an article about the rings," Ron said, pausing halfway for a burp. "They don't wear wedding rings. Marriage on the rocks. We will have to go to war soon."

Harry wondered if Ron and Hermione knew about Dumbledore's relationship with Minerva. Many people assumed that Dumbledore brought her everywhere because she was his deputy, and because he wanted to irk Voldemort. Most everyone thought that Dumbledore was gay and that Minerva McGonagall was a woman possessed of good taste.

"I have to leave soon," Hermione said sleepily. "I have to meet Viktor for brunch tomorrow."

"Krum is still in the country?" Harry asked, curious.

"Low-key," she said, with a shrug. "He is seeing someone here but he doesn't want his legions of fans to mob them."

"He likes our women," Ron muttered darkly, bringing his hand around Hermione and drawing her close. "I hope he isn't trying to seduce some other bloke's girl again!"

"Ron, you were with Lavender!" Hermione said.

Harry tuned out. He ought to write to Krum, to invite him for a drink. He had sympathy for the man. He knew what it was like to be mobbed, to be in the limelight, to not have a moment's privacy.

—-

Harry did not get around to writing to Krum. He remembered it only on the next Saturday, when he was lazily opening the Daily Prophet, and saw a grainy picture of the Bulgarian kneeling before someone, eyes closed in ecstasy, and engaged in an act that was indiscernible, though very, very recognisable.

Harry looked closer, prurient in his need to know. It was good when it was not him in the newspapers, really.

Krum's hands were winding into the black of his partner's cloak. There was no skin on display, but the rise and fall of the heaving chest betrayed the physicality of their encounter. Harry peered closer, and blushed as he saw the fullness in Krum's cheek. His eyes automatically flicked downwards, but the cloak of the partner and Krum's own flowing robes obscured Krum's body mostly from waist-down.

What had Harry expected to see?

His eyes moved to the blaring headlines, the hundreds of opinions from angry fans, and the disappointed remarks from Krum's coach and his mother. Then there was speculation about the identity of his partner. Suspicions pointed to a certain Harry Potter, since journalists had noted that Harry had appeared chummy with Krum during the World Cup. Harry snorted and pushed the papers away. Really, he would not mind if that had been the truth. Krum was broody and sullen, but had a charm all his own. And that expression on Krum's face in the picture - Harry would have loved to make someone feel that way if he could. Then he was overcome by sadness, thinking that a private moment of enjoyment had become something tawdry in the public's eyes.

—-

There was a terrorist attack at a Ministry conference in Bristol. Harry thanked the stars that Hermione was working from home that day. Molly sent word that Percy was safe. Harry rushed there to ascertain Arthur's whereabouts.

"Harry!"

It was Kingsley. With him, unharmed, was Arthur. Harry conjured his Patronus and sent word to Molly.

"We haven't rounded up the suspects," Kingsley boomed. "You had best let Arthur escort you to the secure area. You may be a target."

Arthur and a few alert Aurors dragged Harry to the secure area. It was a barn. Harry had become used to the wizarding world, so he did not bother to question the choice. He entered and the barn doors shut behind him. Inside, looking deep into the eyes of a plain, brown cow, was Voldemort.

Harry wondered if Legilimency worked on cows. He would have to ask Dumbledore. He cleared his throat.

"I take it that they have not yet tracked down the suspects?"

"No, they haven't."

"A touch of havoc, and they lose their heads," Voldemort said, with some asperity. "Perhaps the war would have been easier to win than I had expected."

"The Order was more organized than the Ministry," Harry said wryly, settling himself on a bale of hay, keeping an eye on the exit, his wand ready to cast spells to disarm and shield.

An ethereal platypus appeared in the barn then.

"Are you all right?" the Patronus asked Voldemort, in a deep voice Harry knew immediately.

Voldemort slashed his wand to make the Patronus vanish.

"Krum," Harry said weakly, putting it all together.

Voldemort did not reply.

"You were damn lucky that the photograph did not show you."

"Luck is not what the rest of us get by with, Harry. We were outside. I was shielded by my spells of disillusionment."

Harry looked at him. Voldemort seemed disinclined to meet his gaze. It was awkward. Harry thought of that picture again, and wondered why he had not recognised the concave slope of that taut stomach, beneath the heaving chest.

"The spells worked then," he blurted out. "I didn't recognise you."

"They must have bumbled the chase enough to warn away the suspects," Voldemort said, resolutely changing the topic. "It is time to leave."

—-

Harry did not invite Krum for a drink. What could he have said? The papers refused to stop speculating, even after weeks had passed. Not one of them, Harry noted, guessed right. How could they have?

He thought back to the handsome boy Tom Riddle had been. He had thought once upon a time that Riddle had been a favourite with the girls. He hadn't, in his wildest dreams, imagined that Riddle liked men. How odd!

—-

The next time Harry saw Voldemort was at a charity ball hosted by the Ministry, to raise funds for widows and orphans. He was making the rounds in his usual manner, cutting in and out of groups crisply, saying his cordial greetings and moving to the next clique.

Dumbledore was there too, though Professor McGonagall could not be seen. Harry made his way over to the Headmaster.

"Is Professor McGonagall well?" he asked. Normally, Dumbledore and her were inseparable at these events.

"She is at her sister's home, visiting her family," Dumbledore said cheerfully. "Try the tarts, Harry. They are unusually edible, for Ministry fare."

Voldemort came over, and said, "Albus, Harry, it is a pleasure to have you here to endorse this noble cause."

Dumbledore said lightly, "That sounds lifted from Cornelius's greetings."

"And from his predecessors," Voldemort replied. "Templates are useful when dealing with daily drudgery."

"Not as worthy a cause anymore?" Dumbledore asked.

"I asked them to provide better fare," Voldemort said, pointing to the tart in Dumbledore's fingers. "One more comment from you, and I will revise my instructions for the next ministry event."

"Dare I bite the hand that feedeth me?" Dumbledore wondered.

"You have dared in the past," Voldemort said. "There is a man deep in the bowels of Nurmengard."

Harry noticed how white Dumbledore's fingers were as they grasped the flute of champagne tight.

"As charming as ever, Tom," Dumbledore said quietly, and Harry knew that if they had not been in this public setting, there would have been more than mere words exchanged. Dumbledore strode away, leaving Harry standing there with Voldemort.

"Krum isn't here," he blurted out.

"Try the tarts," Voldemort told him. Then he walked away, towards the next clique.

Harry supposed he might as well as try the tarts.

—-


	3. A still, thin sound

"So you slept with her?" Hermione said disapprovingly. She reminded him so much of Professor McGonagall.

"Yeah, that was a bad idea," Ron chimed in.

There was a punk band playing in their pub that night. Harry felt out of place with his Beatles T-shirt. His Iggy Pop T-shirt would have been more appropriate.

"Look, I really didn't think she was going to start crying and talking about Cedric immediately…immediately after, you know."

"Harry, she has been stuck on him for ages," Ron said. "I'll go buy us another round."

"Ron is right," Hermione said. Harry liked it when Hermione and Ron got along. He really did. He did not like it when they got along and ganged up on him, to scold him about his bad life choices.

"I won't make the mistake again," Harry said quickly, to head her off before she started a long lecture.

—-

He was mid-flight when his broom shattered.

—-

He woke in St. Mungo's.

"Harry," Hermione said softly, and her eyes were so red from crying. Standing behind her, looking terribly worried, was Ron.

—-

When he woke next, there was only Dumbledore sitting with him.

"You gave us such a fright, my dear boy," Dumbledore said. He looked old and exhausted, battered by fate.

"What was it?"

"Miss Chang did not take your rejection lightly," Dumbledore answered sadly.

Ron had once told him to not stick his dick in crazy. He doubted if Ron had really foreseen the consequences. Was foresight real? Hadn't a marriage nullified prophecy?

He then noticed a dour-faced Auror standing guard at the entrance of the room.

"Ah, yes, Voldemort insisted," Dumbledore said wryly. "He has spent the last few weeks being unceasingly criticised by the press, for not providing our beloved champion of Puddlemere United with sufficient protection."

With a pang of sadness, Harry realised he could not most likely return to playing Quidditch. Life felt drained of purpose. There was Cho, who had thought that killing him would mend the grief she suffered because of Cedric's death. And now there was Harry, bedridden, as his health mended, as his body recovered from her stupid idea of avenging Cedric.

"Fuck Voldemort and his bloody PR. Get the Auror out," Harry croaked. "He can stand guard outside the room, if he really wants to."

Dumbledore chuckled and went to speak to the Auror. Harry listened dully as the Headmaster used words more polite than Harry's own. The Auror shot him a glare and obeyed.

"Harry, he was useful," Dumbledore said with a sigh, coming closer and sitting at the foot of Harry's bed.

"The Auror?"

"No, Voldemort," Dumbledore answered. "We needed Petunia or her son to give you blood. They both refused, and I was going to break the Statute of Secrecy to impress upon them our grave need. Then I realised that Voldemort had your blood."

Harry felt sick. Pain flared in his scar and he bent over, vomiting upon himself. Bile rose in him, with his body having little to expunge.

Dumbledore cast a spell to clean Harry up. Magic made everything so convenient. Petunia had not wanted to give Harry blood. What did it matter? Magic made miracles possible. Voldemort had resurrected himself with Harry's blood. And Harry had survived again, by a freak chance.

He would be always a freak.

—-

When Voldemort visited him, it was in the dead of the night. There was torrential rain pounding against the windows. Lightning flashed and pain rose in Harry's scar as Voldemort drew closer, and Harry was fearful as the white of Voldemort's skin glowed translucent in the darkness.

It was a scene stolen right out of a gothic horror film. The painkillers had not been conducive to his sanity.

"I don't want the Auror."

Voldemort came closer and bent to peer into Harry's eyes, very much like how he had peered at that poor cow in the barn.

"If you murder me, Dumbledore will divorce you."

Voldemort blinked and took a step backwards. There, that was better.

"How the hell did you manage to get Krum when I ended up here because of stupid Cho Chang?"

"Perhaps you have run out of your supply of luck," Voldemort offered. "In any case, take the Auror. She is on the run. Unwise to take chances until she has been captured."

"Your Aurors are stupid," Harry muttered. "They haven't caught the terrorists yet. They can't catch Cho. She was a Chaser, you know. Bloody fast."

"We have to let law enforcement take its course," Voldemort pontificated. "As the Headmaster reminds me so often, we are none of us Gods. My hands are tied."

And for some reason, all Harry could think of was wondering if Voldemort's hands were tied above his head while Krum was sucking him off.

"Are the terrorists even alive?" Harry asked quietly, seeing the malicious glint in Voldemort's eyes.

"Clever," Voldemort noted. "No, they died miserably."

Of course. Voldemort would have hunted them down and killed them for what they had tried to do, for trying to kill him in that attack. For all his pontification about letting law enforcement take its course, the preaching did not meet the practice, not at least where his own safety was concerned.

Harry was a horcrux. Fear rose in him, for Cho. The girl had been stupid, but she did not deserve what Voldemort would mete out to her, for trying to kill a horcrux.

"Leave her alone," he said firmly. "Let the Aurors find her. Let the Wizengamot deal with her."

"My spouse has already petitioned to show her amnesty," Voldemort said, mockingly. "Harry, Harry, do you truly wish me to leave her alone? You fell a few hundred feet, and your spine was broken. You would have died if I hadn't valued my horcrux enough. You will never fly on a broomstick again. It will take months before you can walk. Do you wish to still be merciful?"

Harry ignored him. Voldemort stood there for a few minutes, silently, before making a scoffing sound and dropping a packet on Harry's lap.

After the man had left the room, shutting the door sharply behind him, Harry opened the paper bag to see a dozen of the cherry tarts he had fallen in love with at the Ministry charity dinner. They were wrapped loosely in newspaper. Harry reached for his wand and conjured light. It was an article in German, and he did not speak the language, but he recognised the features of the corpse well enough, and the article spoke of Selbstmord. Self killing. Suicide.

He did not eat the tarts.

—-

"I have appointed Viktor Krum as the Professor for Defence," Dumbledore informed him, during his next visit to Harry's small flat in Camden.

Dumbledore had brought him Chocolate Frogs. He gratefully took one. Hermione, who supervised his diet, was stingy with pastries, sugary confections and chocolates. There was more of her parents in her than she was willing to admit.

Viktor Krum.

"Did he apply?" Harry asked. "Or did someone recommend him?"

"Well, his professors spoke highly of him," Dumbledore explained. "He applied. He passed our qualification tests. I had him prepare a curriculum and give a lesson, to evaluate his teaching skills. He carried himself very well indeed. I was impressed."

And, how, Harry wondered, had Viktor Krum acquired those skills in such a short span of time? Krum was intelligent. He was also lacking in social graces. Luckily for his job application, he was seeing someone who knew exactly how to oil a PR machine.

"Why does he want to teach?"

"As you know, he has a partner in Britain. He told me that he desires privacy. Hogwarts will offer him that, isolated as it is. The students may hanker after him for autographs, but that will taper off as time passes. Clearly, he also wishes to live closer to his partner. I suspect he will travel often to London."

Dumbledore must know whom Krum was seeing, right? Harry did not know if Dumbledore knew, and if he was simply choosing to spare Harry that ugly truth. Best not to say anything.

—-

"There are crazy wards in this part of town. Crazy wards all around your flat," Ron complained, setting down a bag of groceries on Harry's small table. He sighed an explosive sigh, and went to the stove. Harry watched him bang pots and pans around, watched him chop vegetables and meat.

"Dumbledore set up some wards when he visited," Harry said. "Before that, Hermione added a few basic ones."

"These don't feel like the ones Hermione sets up," Ron complained. "Prickly ones. Must be Dumbledore's, maybe."

Harry took a deep breath and focussed. He sensed Hermione's magic, soft and comfortable. He sensed Dumbledore's magic, unyielding and protective. He sensed a familiar magic over those, magic wrought by a wand of yew.

Voldemort was not taking chances with his life insurance schemes. Oh, well, Dumbledore would fix the wards during his next visit, Harry was sure. Otherwise, Harry would get rid of them himself.

—-

The Daily Prophet was full of news about Krum's teaching position. Thousands of fans lamented Quidditch's loss. Harry wondered how Krum managed to get out to go have sex without alerting the press. Voldemort must have found a way.

It was only for a year. The curse on the position would make sure Krum left after a year.

Was Voldemort that good at sex that Krum had decided to take a low-paying teaching job to be close to him? Was Krum under the Imperius?

Why was Dumbledore being quiet about it? Normally Dumbledore would not have missed such a heaven sent opportunity to mock Voldemort.

—-

His recovery was slow.

He did not particularly mind. Hermione had brought him enough puzzles to last a lifetime.

She had given him a set of Lego. He liked that a lot. Initially, he had thought that it was a game for children. Oh, how wrong had he been!

There were many visitors over those months. Weasleys came almost every week. Ron usually stopped by in the mornings, with groceries, before leaving to help Fred and George. Hermione came in the evenings. They would have supper together. Harry felt guilty that his recovery was taking away the time she had available to spend alone with Ron, but she had rolled her eyes when he had brought it up.

"Can you imagine how helpless we felt when your aunt refused to help?" she said sadly. "Any of us would have done it in a heartbeat for you, and we could not. I am very grateful that Dumbledore could find a matching blood-donor as quickly as he did."

"Dumbledore is a resourceful man."

"Yes, that he is."

Sometimes, Molly came during the weekdays, for lunching with him.

Dumbledore came on Saturdays, with Minerva McGonagall. While Professor McGonagall did not approve of his flat, often saying, correctly, that it was not safe for Harry to try walking with the crutches in such a cramped space, Dumbledore's charm and wit eased the conversations.

"Don't worry!" Harry assured her multiple times. "I levitate myself everywhere. I only use the crutches when Ron or Hermione is present."

She looked sternly at him. He tried not to squirm. He had started to walk about alone at nights. How did she know? No, she didn't know Legilimency, did she? Maybe it was only that she had known him for a long time. She had known the Marauders before that.

"Viktor is an excellent teacher," she said then, changing the subject. "I have to say that the students are faring much better under him than under Remus. I hadn't expected to see that happen."

Well, Krum was being coached by Voldemort. Harry blinked away images of Voldemort refusing to let Krum come until he had revised the curriculum to meet Voldemort's grand standards. Krum had always been attractive, despite his dourness and broken English. Harry told himself that it was only normal to be curious about Krum's sex life. After all, nearly everyone else was.

"He is methodical," Dumbledore chimed in. "Impartial too. I am proud of how he treats students from all the houses just the same. Severus thinks he is a bleeding heart, easily swayed by the students, but I think we need a teacher who is sympathetic and less stern. He encourages the students's curiosity. He gets along with the staff. His English is improving slowly. I will be sad to lose him after the year is over."

"Are you going to ask Voldemort to break his stupid curse?" Harry asked.

Voldemort wouldn't, would he? He could not be that interested in Krum.

"It is worth a try," Dumbledore said. "There are many dreary Ministry events coming up. He has been trying to get me to go in his stead for the Christmas and New Year events."

"Why?" Minerva asked. "He likes his social hobnobbing."

"He wants to go on vacation," Dumbledore said, chuckling. "I might as well as hold that over him and try to retain Viktor for another year."

Voldemort? Vacation?

Minerva must have had the same thoughts, because she said, "Quest for immortality? Hunting for followers? From the talk on the streets, Mundungus says that the Death Eaters still meet regularly. Perhaps it might be worth it to see if Severus can attend the Malfoy Christmas event."

"Severus has left all that behind. As has Harry," Dumbledore said firmly. "I will not ask anymore from either of them. If Britain is worried, Britain can overthrow him once our marriage is over. The vows will keep him in check until then."

At times, Harry tended to forget how fierce Dumbledore could be when protecting Harry and Snape. The Headmaster had wanted peace. He had also wanted to save them both from a war they would not have survived.

Later, after they had left, Harry lay there thinking about what Dumbledore had done, how Harry had been left free to play Quidditch and drink with his friends at his favourite Camden pub. He had come close to dying anyway, because of stupid Cho. Thinking of Cho made him sad again, as he thought about that night. The sex had been fantastic, breaking a long dry spell that had started from Harry's Sixth Year, after Ginny had sensibly left him for Michael Corner. He had nursed a crush on Cho for many years. He had leapt at the chance to have sex with her. She had been funny and nice until they had got their clothes off.

Things had gone downhill fast. She did not like it when he tried to go down on her. He had wondered why. Ron had told him that going down on a girl was a surefire way of getting her ready for action.

Harry had not made a fuss out of it. Why would he? She had been his fantasy since he had started fantasizing about sex.

Cho had just turned over and let him take her. She had been tight, slick and warm. God, just remembering how it had felt made him touch himself, made him want to wank. Then his mind reminded him of the rest of it. He had been close to coming, when she had started crying. Frightened that he had hurt her somehow, he had asked her if she was all right. She had started talking about Cedric. She had sounded deranged. Harry remembered feeling dirty, remembered stumbling off the bed and haphazardly throwing on his clothes, and making his way out of her front door.

Then she had tried to kill him. She would have succeeded too, if not for Dumbledore's resourcefulness, if not for Voldemort's bloody obsession with immortality and horcruxes.

He felt sick and he felt aroused. Memories of her fair skin and dark hair mixed with the memories of her crying and raving about Cedric. He blindly reached his hand out for his glasses and pushed up onto his face. He needed a walk. His fingers found the grips of his crutches and he winced as his stomach muscles refused to cooperate as easily as they once had in pushing himself up. Maybe he really should start trying the yoga routines Hermione had shown him for building strength. It was just that yoga seemed like something for women, or something for hippies. Arthur loved it. If Hermione and Arthur both swore by it, it could not be that awful, could it?

He made the first few steps easily, by memory. Then the right crutch hit against the edge of his dining table and he staggered onto the left one to balance himself, but he overcompensated, and found himself on the floor. There was a fiery sensation in his chest, as he tried to catch his breath. Oh, that did not bode well. He tried to summon his wand to him, and was irritated when it did not work. His summoning spells had turned weaker after his fall. He needed to practise more.

Hedwig flew over to him. Good girl.

"Go get Dumbledore," he told her. She looked at him solemnly and took off. The hours seemed long and his pain endured without giving him a break. Voldemort was right, Harry thought, as he clutched his chest. He must have really run out of his life's supply of luck.

It was Voldemort who came though Harry's cramped floo, looking disgruntled, in a particularly foul temper.

"Your owl came to Dumbledore's office," Voldemort muttered, dusting his robes. "The old man was in the cat's bed already."

"Is Hedwig all right?" Harry wheezed through his pain, frightened for her, remembering how much Voldemort disliked the Floo.

"Flew off," Voldemort said, unconcerned. "What is wrong with you?" Then, without bothering to decipher Harry's explanation, he brought his wand and touched Harry's scar.

"Oh, your heart is giving out," Voldemort said, as if that was a minor inconvenience.

It was, Harry thought grimly, shoving the wand away, but then crumpling into Voldemort's robes and clasping them as if they were lifelines, much the way Krum had in that photograph, and wasn't that a really stupid thing to remember when his heart was giving out?

Voldemort knelt down and pried Harry's fingers away from his robes, before pushing Harry down flat to the ground, and then casting what seemed to a rainbow of spells over Harry, chanting in a language that sounded old enough and dead enough to interest Hermione. Harry's awareness slipped in and out, and then he finally gave in to the relief of sleep.

When he woke up, he was on his small bed, and there were blankets strewn haphazardly atop him, and there were pillows here and there, and he saw none of the neatness with which Hermione tucked him in. Voldemort was sitting at Harry's small dining table, sipping Tesco's hazelnut coffee from Harry's Puddlemere coffee cup.

"Can I have some?" Harry croaked. His chest hurt less. He had a pounding headache, but he could live with that. "Could you send for Dumbledore?" He needed Madam Pomfrey. He needed Hermione and Ron.

"You can't. Once you are out of the woods," Voldemort replied. "I shall stay until I am sure that they can't kill you."

"Dumbledore?" Harry asked groggily. "Dumbledore won't kill me."

"The legion of Healers he will call in," Voldemort elucidated. "Buy better coffee. I prefer the afternoon blend they sell at Harrods."

—-

Harry waited until he was back on his feet before making a trip to Harrods. He could not care less what Voldemort liked. He was only curious to find out if Harrods coffee was really as good as all that.

—-

"Um, hello!" He greeted Krum, determined to play cheerfully ignorant of what he knew. He had stumbled into the Bulgarian when he had come to Hogwarts to visit Dumbledore.

"Harry, good to see you are healthy," Krum said warmly, clasping his arm for an instant, and falling into step beside him.

Krum's accent was still strongly distinguishable, but he had stopped mumbling. His vocabulary was vastly improved.

"You are leaving soon, aren't you?" Harry asked. "The students will miss you."

"I hope the Headmaster will renew my contract, Harry."

Krum left him at the base of the staircase. Harry made his way to Dumbledore's office.

"Harry! You join me at a magnificent moment!" Dumbledore said cheerfully. "Voldemort agreed to break the curse on the position."

"You do know that he is fucking Krum, right?" Harry blurted out, and then immediately regretted it at the look of shock on Dumbledore's face.

"You didn't know?"

"I didn't know that you knew," Dumbledore said evenly. "It is imperative that the curse is broken as soon as possible, that qualified teachers educate the children in a subject that could save their lives one day. Viktor is qualified, despite his curious choice in partners. His curriculum is sensible, without a jot of propaganda. I monitor him closely."

Harry did not reply. Dumbledore had given Krum the job knowing that Voldemort was fucking him, knowing that Voldemort would break the curse if he wanted to keep Krum close.

"Are you interested in the position, Harry?" Dumbledore asked. "I doubt Voldemort will put up a battle over it, if you choose to apply."

"No!" Harry had no interest in teaching. God, he would be as bad as Snape. He shook his head vehemently.

Dumbledore chivvied him into a cosy chair and settled him with a cup of tea. Harry blew over it softly and thought about Voldemort's odd connection with Krum. He had not, somehow, expected that to last more than a few weeks. As difficult as it was to imagine Voldemort as a sexual being, it was harder still to imagine him being capable of, or interested in, anything of a longer term than merely a set of sexual transactions.

"When I sent Hedwig to you, Voldemort came instead," he said, then, remembering what had struck him as extremely odd at the time, though he had been too busy trying not to die back then.

"He was here that night," Dumbledore said, setting a plate of biscuits before Harry. He sighed and walked over to where Fawkes was roosting.

"What is it?" Harry asked, sensing a change in Dumbledore's mood.

"I have looked forward to death, Harry. For a long time," Dumbledore's shoulders stooped and Harry set down his tea with a clatter.

"When one is as old as I am, as weary as I am, as borne down by life and misfortune as I am, death becomes palatable," Dumbledore continued softly.

Harry walked to him and awkwardly touched his shoulder, in support, wanting to say something right, but failing to find the words. He was overwhelmed too. Dumbledore was the last man he expected to see admit that. Dumbledore was strong and irrepressible, in the face of fate.

"Why was he here?"

Dumbledore brought his shrivelled arm to touch Harry's cheek. Harry flinched and Dumbledore smiled sadly.

"This is a death sentence, Harry. For the sake of our pact, we have decided that I need to be alive for a while longer, for a great while longer than any medicine would permit. He suggested a method that he knew of, which was initially invented to prolong the sufferer's torment by keeping him alive. There is a potion and there is a casting. So I require his presence during the preparation. That is why he was here. The treatment tires me physically. That is why I was abed."

—-

Krum started his second year at Hogwarts. The students were happy.

Harry wondered if Voldemort would turn up for the annual Ministry dinner. He was going with Ron and Hermione.

Voldemort did not turn up. Neither did Dumbledore. There were thousands of owls swooping into the hall, carrying editions of the Evening Prophet.

Harry tried his best to not cheer loudly when the front page had blaring headlines from the enterprising Rita Skeeter. She had got her grubby hands on the dirt. Oh, she wrote in great, scandalous depth about Krum and the Minister. It was the only time he had read an article completely.

"Poor Viktor!" Hermione exclaimed. "He must have been coerced!"

"Hermione, he isn't exactly a walking, talking wizard's wetdream," Ron muttered, though Harry remembered that Ron had a crush on Krum in their fourth year. "We are not talking about Oliver Wood."

—-

Harry rushed to Hogwarts, knowing that Dumbledore and Voldemort would be there, deep in conference.

He was right. He opened the door to Dumbledore's office to find them both on edge, one pacing and the other restlessly skimming the pile of letters that lay before them. They looked up at him as he crossed the threshold.

"We don't have to go to war, do we?" Harry asked, suddenly frightened. Hermione and Ron were going to get married.

Dumbledore sighed and motioned him across to a chair. Harry looked at Voldemort for an answer, though he did not know why he did that.

"Neither of us wish to," Voldemort said tersely.

There was a knock on the door. It was Krum. He looked at Dumbledore in worry but the Headmaster offered him a kind smile. The stress on his features lessened and he walked to Voldemort, reaching out his right hand, as if to seek comfort, as if to seek validation. Voldemort glared at him, but then relented and placed his palm in Krum's hand, for an instant, before moving it swiftly away.

Harry's notion about a sex-fuelled set of one-night stands no longer held true, clearly.

"I will go," Krum offered seriously. "Europe has many jobs."

"It is not safe," Voldemort said, dismissing the idea.

"China, then. They are looking for a Quidditch coach for their national team."

"India too!" Harry said, remembering the letters he had received from their national team.

"Overreactions," Voldemort said briskly, walking over to Dumbledore's table and picking up one of the letters at random. "This too shall pass. The only reaction that we need is that of non-reaction. Go back to your rooms, Viktor. I shall send word later."

After Krum had left, Dumbledore sagged in his chair and brought his fingers to his temples.

"I should leave too," Harry said, rising. "Let me know if you need anything, Professor."

"Perhaps he can," Voldemort said then.

Dumbledore looked at Harry carefully, before saying, "We are not here because of the letters, Harry. We are here today because of the potion and the casting. The letters have delayed us."

Oh, Dumbledore's treatment! That must be why Dumbledore was tired. Harry nodded solemnly and asked, "Can I do anything to help?"

"The potion is simple," Voldemort said. "The casting involves more complexity. The casting needs to be done first. It is tiring. A fresh mind is best for brewing."

"Can't Professor Dumbledore do that? I sucked at Potions," Harry confessed. Dumbledore chuckled at his honesty.

"The curse may contaminate the ritual, Harry," Dumbledore explained. "I shall have to leave the room, and we cast words of containment, to make sure that there is no contamination."

"I haven't brewed since I left school. I am bad at it."

Voldemort did not look convinced. He said, "Nobody with an alert mind can be terrible at following highly specific step-by-step instructions. I shall prepare the ingredients. Your task is to add them and brew."

Harry nodded nervously. His palms were sweaty. He had images in his mind of Snape ranting about his ineptitude in the subject. Now he would prove Snape right before Dumbledore and Voldemort. They would have to start over from scratch.

He was stationed at a side-table, that held a small tempered glass cauldron, under which was a magical fire. Voldemort was casting wards, and they pulsed over Harry's skin in an oddly intimate way.

"Should I wash my hands?" he asked.

"There are spells to sterilise," Voldemort said. "Hold still. Let me."

Harry felt scoured, inside and out. He was embarrassed, though he was not sure why. Voldemort was selecting knives and laying out his ingredients on the workspace he had made for himself at the Headmaster's desk. Harry looked around, shifting from foot to foot, and saw that the portraits were empty.

"The wards keep out ambient magic," Voldemort explained, as if reading what was on Harry's mind. "For optimal results, it is best that any casting, any brewing, keep only the magic of the creator."

Voldemort's chopping style did not make sense to Harry. There was no consistency in how he was chopping the ingredients. Snape certainly would not have accepted that.

"Does this potion not care about the ingredients being evenly chopped?" he dared ask, seeing that Voldemort did not seem to be in a particularly angry mood.

"No potion does, Harry. If that had been the case, Wormtail's brewing would not have sufficed to restore me. The power in the ingredients matters. You cannot create strength out of weakness. There, you are ready to brew now." Voldemort stepped back and waved his hand to conjure a floating scroll that opened up before Harry, listing the instructions. "The last ingredient needs to be taken fresh. Call me at that stage."

"You will be casting now?"

"Yes."

Harry focussed hard on the instructions, determined to get it right to the best of his ability, in a way that he had not felt determined even in the NEWTs. This was for Dumbledore. And, he thought curiously, he did not wish to show his incompetence before Voldemort.

Voldemort's voice rose melodious and firm, as he cast in a language ancient and strong, and ripples of magic cascading over Harry's skin, and over his soul.

Harry lost himself to that voice, and to the rhythm of brewing, and time passed him unmarked. For the first time in many months, he was not lapsing to his memories about Cho and how she had tried to kill him. All that he knew of was the now, grounded by Voldemort's magic, surrounded by Voldemort's magic, warmed within by Voldemort's magic awakening in his scar, transmuting his sorrows into serenity. He could not hear the crackling of the logs in the fireplace, or the noises of the night, or the snow falling outside, or the sputtering of the liquid in the cauldron. The casting faded too, and all that there was a still, thin sound.

"Harry?"

Harry blinked and looked up at Voldemort. The man looked tired. The casting must have taken a severe toll on him. Still soaring on a sea of peace, Harry smiled at him warmly.

Voldemort looked wary, but nodded abruptly, and stared into the cauldron Harry was standing over, as if it held the answers to Harry's change in temperament.

"The last ingredient," Voldemort murmured. He pushed down the sleeve of his left hand and made a clean cut across his palm, length-wise, and let the blood drip downwards into the cauldron.

"Blood?" Harry asked. "Because the strongest magic is that of the blood?" Had Dumbledore told him that once?

"I cast the curse," Voldemort explained. "So the alleviative needs an amount of me willingly given, for the magic to confirm my intent. It doesn't need to be blood. It can be hair. It can be skin. It can be semen."

"So my blood won't work?" Harry asked curiously. "I have some of yours."

"While it is true that my blood was given willingly to you, the commutative property does not hold for magic of this nature."

Voldemort covered his mouth suddenly, to conceal a yawn, and Harry had to suppress a laugh.

"You should go home," Harry told him, still floating on the endorphins that the casting had somehow wrapped him up in. "I will give this to Dumbledore."

Voldemort nodded and took a step backwards, as if disconcerted by Harry. Harry reached out and clasped his left hand, and took his wand to mutter a healing spell for the cut that was still bleeding.

"Happy Birthday," he whispered.

Voldemort jerked his arm backwards and turned away, walking to the fireplace without a word more to Harry, without his face betraying even the least of his usual disapproval for the Floo.

When Dumbledore came back and undid Voldemort's wards to keep out ambient magic, he said, "I must say that he wards himself in better than a vampire in a crypt."

Harry stood over the cauldron, not knowing what else to do, feeling somewhat jarred by Voldemort's abrupt exit.

"What sort of magic is this?" he asked Dumbledore. "Dark magic? It uses blood." What else could explain this state of illusion he was suspended in, that he was slowly drifting downwards from?

Dumbledore smiled sadly and came to Harry. He said quietly, "The most powerful magic is that of the blood, Harry. It is what protected you at the Dursleys. It was not dark then. This, too, is not dark magic. Blood magic sealed by love protected you once. Blood magic sealed by hate resurrected him once. This, Harry, this is blood magic sealed by forgiveness."

"Forgiveness?" Harry asked, aghast.

"I trespassed on land that he had inherited, from the Gaunts. I stole what was his, even if he had stolen it from another before," Dumbledore explained. "Magic works literally, at times. The owner has to forgive the thief, for a protective curse to alleviate its effects."

"He did that?" Harry could not believe that. As he sunk to his normal state of lethargy after the high of Voldemort's casting, he began looking at it with more suspicion. Was Voldemort even capable of such a thing as forgiveness, even if the crime was existent only in his warped mind?

"Magic does not require him to forgive," Dumbledore said. "He only has to cast, to give of his magic, to give of his blood, to confirm the intent."

"It tires him," Harry remembered. "It must be a lot of work."

"He is tired in the evenings," Dumbledore said, chuckling. "I believe bureaucracy has a way of draining his energy. He enjoys the power. He hates the restraints and the diplomacy required. Government has a way of sorting out Viva la revolucion."

Harry did not reply, still thinking about how abruptly Voldemort had left.

"You look lighter, Harry," Dumbledore commented then, peering closely at him. "I am glad to see that your spirits are rising, that you are putting behind the tragedy of Miss Chang's actions."

—-


	4. What is man that you make much of him?

He should not have drunk so much, he thought. Hermione was matching him pint for pint. Her unusual indulgence must have something to do with her latest dispute with Ron. She had ranted about that for a while. Harry could make neither head or tail of it.

"He will come back soon," he mumbled finally. "He always does."

Hermione sniffled and rested her head on Harry's shoulder.

"You are skinnier than him," she muttered.

Harry wanted to protest. Wasn't it sufficient that he was also in the doghouse with her? Ron was not speaking to him too, no doubt having crafted extreme scenarios of Harry's betrayal by siding with Hermione. Ron did that. He would come around. He always did. Hermione would take him back. She always did.

"I have been thinking about applying to jobs," Harry said, to change the topic. He had wanted to bring it up earlier, but after a few pints of liquid courage seemed the best. The IPA had made his head woozy and his mood confident.

There was the usual crowd at the local. He cast his eyes around anyway, hoping to see if he could pull for the night. Hermione wouldn't approve, but she was halfway to sleep. Maybe he would safely deposit her in the Knight bus and come back.

"At the Ministry?" she asked, suddenly sharp, despite the alcohol coursing through her blood.

"What? No!" Harry exclaimed, just thinking of working like Percy or Hermione in some small and weird department tucked away in London. Besides, he was fairly sure that Voldemort would jinx his applications, even if he tried to apply, even if he cared to apply.

"At Hogwarts then?" Hermione asked. "Viktor would enjoy having someone his own age as a colleague."

She saw Krum less frequently than she used to, after the tabloid scandals of last year. She was still convinced that he was being coerced somehow. Harry stared at his beer morosely. Whatever it was, it was still going on, between Krum and Voldemort. Harry did not know how he knew it, but he knew it somehow. He frowned. Well, who was he to judge Krum's terrible life choices?

He did not want to work at Hogwarts. He wanted no part of whatever charade was going on between Dumbledore and Voldemort. He didn't mind helping out Dumbledore, by brewing that potion, but they had never asked him to, after that night. He was irritated about that. He had done his task perfectly, he knew. Why did they overlook that? Did Voldemort hate casting with Harry in the same room? It wasn't that Harry wanted to be called back. That casting had been fascinating, though, in the peace it had brought him. It took a lot of alcohol to reach the same level of serenity.

"Not Hogwarts," Harry said. "I want to do something stupid. Something fun."

Hermione looked up at him and blinked blearily.

The cogs, that turned sharp and fast in her wonderful brain, must have been doused by alcohol into dreary stupor, because she said brightly, "Why don't you open a clothing store, Harry? Madam Malkin's is a monopoly in the country. Monopolies are not good. Customers win if there is competition. Advances in technology and style can only happen with competition."

—-

Harry deposited her in the Knight bus and stumbled back to the local. There was a girl standing there, right outside, with green hair, wearing a black sweater and a pink leather skirt, smoking. There were tattoos on her thin wrists. She was petite from up the waist, and heavily curved down her hips to her legs. Harry found her attractive, even in the dark of the night, even though his senses were shot by alcohol.

"Hi there!"

A strange sensation of pain started in his scar. Pain from the scar was not unusual for Harry. Voldemort had massive temper issues, after all. This pain seemed to be more cause than consequence though. Harry shrugged it off and walked closer to the girl, who was now beckoning him to her. Her eyes were bright with interest.

—-

They stumbled back into the local and she led him to the bathrooms. Harry could hardly believe his good luck. Wow, Hermione would not approve, but Ron certainly would be envious, when they were back on speaking terms again.

"You aren't too drunk, are you?" she asked then, looking him over critically.

"I am fine," Harry assured her, even managing to keep his fingers steady as he reached out to tuck a few curls of her green hair behind her ears. She was lovely, especially when her eyes softened.

"You don't seem the usual type," she muttered, shifting restlessly as he traced her round cheeks and her plump, plump lips.

Was that a good thing? The pain in his head surged them, and he lost his footing, nearly falling to his knees on the dirty floor. The smells of the bathroom made it worse and he looked at her apologetically, before throwing up.

God, whatever Voldemort was up to, it was weird, even by that madman's standards.

"Are you ok?" she asked, looking a bit frightened, looking disgusted.

At least she had not run away. She really was a lovely girl.

"Later, maybe, if I again see you," Harry muttered, dabbing his lips with his jacket's sleeves. Voldemort was not letting up. Harry did not want to take this lovely girl home and then spend all night sick and in the bathroom. She deserved a better night than that.

She smiled and shrugged. Then she slipped a piece of paper into the pocket of his jacket and left the bathroom. He watched her easy saunter, her sweater clinging to her breasts in a pleasing way, her swinging hips in the tight skirt, and decided he would definitely call her the next day.

His best bet for the night, though, he thought grimly, was to go back to his flat and ride Voldemort's weirdness out. What was the man up to? Maybe he was fucking Krum. If it was that, wouldn't Harry have felt this before?

He had only made his way halfway down the street when the pain nearly blinded him. He grabbed his wand with a hand, the nearest lamppost with the other and tried to steady himself.

Voldemort apparated before him then, right in the middle of that wide road, and fell to his knees, and reached out a hand towards him. There were lacerations all over his neck and reaching inwards into the flesh hidden by his robes. His eyes were so dilated in pain. Harry swore and ran to him just as a policeman rounded the corner, shielding him from the policeman's sight.

"No funny business outside!" The bobby called out, no doubt thinking that he had walked onto a blow job, with Harry standing, hiding his partner.

This was a part of Camden where funny business was not too strictly frowned upon. Besides, Amy Winehouse must have shown them all far worse than anything Harry could do here. So the bobby turned back and walked away. Harry breathed in relief and pulled Voldemort up. Sweat was dripping down Voldemort's face.

"What have you been doing?" Harry muttered, smelling blood.

"Let me, let me, it is not safe," Voldemort whispered, his tone fevered and mad, and Apparated them onto a moor.

A dog howled to the moon somewhere on the marshes. A cold wind tormented Harry even through his jacket. Voldemort slumped into Harry's arms, incoherently speaking about souls and how Harry smelled like a pub.

Harry steadied them both and looked around. All was barren and desolate, with trees lining the horizon, and rocks at the edges, but there was a house right before them, and somehow instinct made him drag them there, slowly. Voldemort veered between trying to support himself and crashing into Harry.

Harry thought he should have drunk more, to deal with this. The pain in his scar had reduced by a significant amount, to a dull throb. He was grateful for that. Must be the proximity. Proximity did weird things to them, from what Dumbledore had once explained about the bond.

The door was wide open and there was a warm fire in the hearth inviting them inside. It could be a trick to kill him somehow, but Harry was tired and disorientated, confused and unable to do his usual thinking on his feet.

He let Voldemort drop to the carpet and sat down beside him. First things first, he decided dimly, thinking through the alcohol and cast a locking spell on the door.

"Dumbledore," he muttered. The Headmaster would know what to do.

Voldemort stirred as if the name had energised him and clawed his way to the large, mahogany chaise, upholstered in red. It did bring out his complexion, Harry noted dully, even if that was not saying much when he was bleeding all over and clenching his teeth tight from the pain.

"The carpet not good enough for you?" Harry asked.

It was a plush, red carpet. Harry liked it.

"Aggravates," Voldemort said softly, sighing in relief as he sunk onto the chaise. Harry saw that the lacerations on his neck and fingers had darkened with blood.

Voldemort looked at his hands in dismay. "Milk and honey," he said to himself. "I am going to soak in the bath. Milk soothes the bleeding. Come get me if we are attacked."

Harry was about to suggest calling for Dumbledore, when Voldemort convulsed and fell into a faint, and all Harry could think of dumbly was that he really looked a bit like a Renaissance painting, a pale damsel in distress on a red chaise, waiting for a knight. Except for the blood.

"Milk and honey," Harry murmured to himself, panicking, looking at the doors that led away into the house. He opened them all, one after the other, and found the kitchen, a cosy reading room, and a large bedroom. He could see one leg of a giant, red bathtub peeking out from behind a door in the bedroom. He was about to levitate the man, and then summon milk and honey, when Voldemort came to and tried to shove himself up.

"Will you just make up your mind?" Harry muttered, tired and feeling as if there were rampaging ghouls in his head. Voldemort had been doing this. When they had made their way across the moor, he had crashed into Harry for support, and then had shoved away as if to keep distance from Harry. "Either stay unconscious and let me help, or stay conscious and manage by yourself!"

Voldemort looked bewildered. There wasn't enough sense to fill a thimble between the pair of them right then, Harry realised grimly. He supported Voldemort and they made their way to the bathtub.

Harry summoned milk and honey, and for some reason there were litres of them in the house. Bottles came soaring in, and poured themselves into the bathtub. Voldemort sighed and clambered over into the tub, robed.

Harry sank beside the tub, facing the large bedroom, and rested his pounding head against the cool porcelain. He could not be even bothered to protest or be repulsed when robes sodden with milk and honey fell in a slush beside him. The moon was shining through the window and the cold winds over the moors swept in relentless. He fell asleep to the cold, to the howls of the wind, to the smell of alcohol and milk and honey and that girl's smoke in his jacket still, to the feeling of dryness in his mouth, cradling his head between his knees. He had fallen asleep in worse places. He had been trained in a cupboard, after all.

When he woke, he was on the large, red bed he had seen earlier, and there were red blankets askew atop him. His spectacles were squashed between his face and the pillows. He winced and straightened them, and rubbed the lines on his face left behind by the frame. He looked around. He heard sounds from the entrance hall. He walked out, straightening his jacket, patting down his hair, to find Voldemort on the chaise, lounging underneath a red blanket.

"Everything is red," Harry said, peering down at Voldemort over the neck of the chaise, and wondered why he had said that, instead of asking the important questions.

Voldemort nodded and shifted to face him fully, and the blanket slipped slightly to reveal an inch of his fingers. They was not bleeding. The lacerations were healing slowly. Harry wondered if the dark, red ones at his neck had also started healing. They had looked gruesome.

Before he knew it, Harry was reaching down to pull the blanket from the neck, to the collarbones, exposing slowly healing skin. Good. That was good. Harry yawned and brought his hand back. He looked up at Voldemort to see the man watching him carefully, as if Harry was an unpredictable, dangerous opponent. God, Voldemort was paranoid.

"What were you doing?" Harry asked. "It messed with my head badly."

"Dying," Voldemort said plainly. "Nagini was captured yesterday."

The big snake. She was a horcrux, Harry remembered in shock. He peered at Voldemort closely. There was a strange sense of fear and expectancy on his features.

"Is she alive?"

"I ceased bleeding at dawn."

Harry admired how Voldemort's voice was steady, how his gaze held Harry's, though his fingers trembled as they held the blanket to his chest. Voldemort had not pulled it back to his chin after Harry had swept it down. Harry stepped back in shock. Why had he done something so stupid? He had taken a liberty he would not have dared take even with Hermione or Ron. Voldemort did not seem overly concerned about that. Why would he? His focus was on his lost horcrux, his dead, serpentine companion, and the pain of his soul's destruction. Having shared a portion of that pain through the scar, Harry felt his heart lurch in sympathy.

"I thought it was you," Voldemort said then, abruptly. "She had been well-protected."

Voldemort had come to check on him first. Harry gripped the head of the chaise as he thought about it. If it had indeed been Harry, Voldemort had been in no state to duel anyone that night. Even if he had gone to Nagini first, he would have been in poor shape to rescue her. Why had he run that risk then? It was unlike him to worry about spilt milk. Harry was glad, for some reason he could not place, that Voldemort had come to save the wrong horcrux. He did not want a war, so close to Ron's and Hermione's plans for marriage, just when all of them had been rebuilding their lives. It was better that the marriage continued, and that the wedded survived for a good while longer.

Not knowing what to say, Harry offered, "I have been well-protected. Your wards run the length of Camden. Dumbledore's wards also."

"Our wards cannot protect you from what perils you seek out willingly." Voldemort hesitated and continued, "I had best deliver you to Dumbledore and investigate this." He pushed himself up into a sitting position, and the blanket fell to his hips. It was not as if Harry was seeing him for the first time. The cauldron rose to his memory. Maybe it was the red all around, Harry wondered, that he found Voldemort's body fascinating right then.

"I am not hardened to immodesty from years of playing team sports or living in dormitories with other young men," Voldemort said dryly. "If you could step into the kitchen for a few moments, I will join you."

So fussy, Harry thought. Who was so fussy about skin? Besides, Voldemort was fucking Krum. Was he keeping his clothes on for that too?

Annoyed, Harry stepped into the kitchen and made himself a pot of coffee with Harrods reserve. It looked expensive. It still tasted like his Tesco's blend, he convinced himself.

"What are you going to do with yourself?" Voldemort asked then, stepping into the kitchen, attired in his usual robes of black. "Drinking and clubbing in Camden is hardly a vocation."

Said the man whose vocation had been to terrorise a country until he had obtained what he desired.

"I am off to open a clothing store," Harry told him jokingly. "Monopolies are bad things. Madam Malkin's is a monopoly."

Voldemort did not say anything, instead just grabbing the pot of coffee Harry had made, and pouring himself a lukewarm cup.

—-

"I don't understand why he continues his affair with Krum," Harry finally told Dumbledore, after he had hemmed and hawed over the question for months, wondering whom to ask.

"Tall, dark and handsome may be his type," Dumbledore said, chuckling. Fawkes trilled. That was an answer lifted right out of Witch Weekly.

He was curious though. So he asked, "Were there other tall, dark and handsome men before?"

"Immortality was his concern when his peers in school were concerned about love," Dumbledore said. "He has always been a little slow to mature, I suppose."

Harry blinked as he wondered what to make of that.

"There was someone, if the rumours are to be believed. These rumours can arise when we strive to humanise someone, to make them needy creatures of flesh, folly, and blood, just like the rest of us," Dumbledore said, more seriously. "If there was someone, it had been kept tightly under the wraps."

Had that someone once dwelt in the house by the moor? That could explain the red. Voldemort had never struck Harry as someone who knew much about colours.

"What about you, Harry?" Dumbledore asked. "As much as I am overjoyed by your successful enterprise in dressing up the common man, I have to ask what motivated you to pursue that? You had never struck me as the type to open a shop of that sort."

Harry had given Dumbledore a standing discount. He had given all the Hogwarts teachers, except Krum, a standing discount at his new shop.

He had hunted around for names. After weeks of thinking up and discarding one name after another, he had given up and gone to his Camden local with Ron and Hermione. She had been drunk enough to suggest 'Harry's'. It was bad a name as any other they had thought of so far, and listening to drunken Hermione's ideas had worked out for him reasonably well, so 'Harry's' opened in Knockturn Alley a week later, propped by a loan from Fred and George Weasley, and a lease from Gringotts who had been trying to find someone to take that awful looking shop between a shaman's shop and a bordello.

Diagon Alley had been expensive and Harry did not want to start anything as foolish as his outfitter's shop there. Knockturn Alley was fine enough for him. He could fail, and he could fail quietly.

He had given a discount to the bordello workers and to their customers. They had become his sole patrons in the first few weeks. The proceeds had kept him below even, without going broke, while he imported textiles from Parisian mercers and Milanese merchants, while he hired tailors and seamstresses, while he painted the old shack and made it look moderately welcoming.

Then the Hogwarts professors had started coming in, and Dumbledore had really liked the brilliant pink and green silks Harry had imported from China expressly for him. Minerva called the shop a tad colourful for her preferences. Harry could not blame her. There wasn't a great variety of English yarn on his shelves yet. The yarn merchants did not like Harry's haggling methods. They did not like his profound ignorance about their wares. He had been thinking about hiring a buyer.

Ron had then taken an advertisement in the Daily Prophet, as a birthday gift of sorts, and then more customers had started walking through his doors. He had become less of a freakshow after the marriage, so he was relieved to be standing behind the till without strangers pointing to his stupid scar.

—-

And then Narcissa Malfoy walked into his shop. It was a quiet time. Tuesday mid-morning. He had been making himself a second cup of his Tesco's coffee. They looked at each other awkwardly for a moment.

"Severus spoke highly of your silks."

Oh, Snape bought silks from his shop? Harry did not know that. Snape had never stepped foot in there. Maybe Dumbledore was buying for him. Dumbledore bought gifts for others frequently. Snape liked his silks? Well, that, if anything, should console Harry that he had at least found something worthwhile to do with his life that Snape approved of.

Narcissa was still patiently waiting. Harry cleared his throat, put down his pot of coffee, and walked over to her. She was a good customer. She knew what she liked. She knew to ask the right questions. She inspected the fabrics by holding them to the light. Harry realised that she was important. She could bring in a different segment of customers to him, by word of mouth.

"I have just received an assortment from Austria," he said then, trying to sound nonchalant and professional, though he was terrified. "They are not silks. You may wish to look at them, nevertheless. I wonder what a lady of taste will think of them."

She paused in inspecting a stole and looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. He brought her to the back of the shop, where he had bundles lying askew. She picked her way daintily through them, and sat down on a bale of linen as he brought the new assortment out.

She hummed and muttered under her breath, as she looked through them with painstaking attention to detail. Then she made two bundles. One to the left and one to the right, and sorted her way through the assortment. He knelt beside her and helped her spread open each swathe of fabric.

"These are durable," she said, waving to the left. And she waved to the right, and said, "These are catchy. The younger generations, those who like to buy clothes every season, will enjoy them a great deal. There is a place for both on your shelves, I daresay."

"Will you be my buyer?" Harry asked, still kneeling beside her, impressed by her efficient, ruthless ways.

Then he realised he must have committed some sort of social crime. She looked disconcerted. Then she looked away and said, "My husband does not approve of his wife working for a living, I am afraid. I am flattered, Harry."

Suddenly saddened by her situation, he asked softly, "Would you, otherwise?"

She nodded.

There, surrounded by bales of clothes, kneeling beside a bird in a cage, he decided he would try to change Lucius Malfoy's mind somehow.

"I will talk to him," he said. "I will tell him how valuable you could be to my business. He will be impressed by what you can do, I think."

Malfoy was a dandy, wasn't he? Clothes seemed right up his alley.

A sparkle of amusement lit her eyes and she said, "Oh, Harry, I wish it were that facile. It is rarely ever so."

Harry bit his lips as he thought about the problem.

—

"Hi!" Harry said brightly, as he stepped into the anteroom. The Auror looked grimly at him. Oh, these days, his fame counted for nothing. He was glad for the marriage, for a multitude of reasons.

"He will see you now," said Griselda, as she stepped out of the inner room.

"Madam Marchbanks!" Harry greeted her enthusiastically. She was still wearing Madam Malkin's. He wondered how he could appeal to her generation, to those who liked the tried and the trusted.

Yet, she had conceded to work with Voldemort. She was thriving in his regime, Harry had heard. She was powerful, more powerful than she had been during Fudge's era. Hermione was of the opinion that Voldemort genuinely liked her, and that she liked his methodical approach towards governance. Dumbledore liked her too. Harry guessed that was the source of her power.

He stepped into the room.

"Harry," Voldemort said, rising from his seat.

"Hi," Harry said awkwardly, as the door closed behind them.

They had not seen each other after that night on the moor. Harry knew that Voldemort still came to Hogwarts to brew and cast Dumbledore's treatment, he knew from Hermione and the Daily Prophet that Krum was still involved with Voldemort. Yet, all he could think of, as he looked at Voldemort, was that the man had been breathtakingly beautiful on that chaise, against the red cushions and the silken blanket.

Now that Harry thought more about it, the bordello near his shop had the same decor. Had Voldemort been inspired by that? Had his old lover been a gigolo at the bordello. Many dark wizards came there, Harry was sure. Maybe Voldemort had met the prostitute when he had been an assistant at Borgin's shop. Maybe he had gone there on payday, to get rid of his virginity, and he had fallen in love with a whore amid all the red cushions and lanterns in the bordello's sleazy, small bedrooms.

"What can I do for you?" Voldemort asked politely, beckoning him to a chair.

"Um, I guess I could have written," Harry said. "I could have sent word to Dumbledore, to tell you. Sorry I came here. I didn't mean to waste your time."

Voldemort blinked and poured him a cup of coffee. Harry identified the smell of Harrod's reserve. He wondered what good old Griselda had to say about this Muggle abomination. He gathered the cup to him and blew over the surface, letting the familiar scent settle him in.

"What is it?"

"Narcissa.I don't-" Harry frowned. No, she was married. He could not address her that way, he was sure. It was improper, for some reason he did not understand. "Mrs. Malfoy knows about clothes. I want to hire her. She said her husband doesn't want her to work."

"There is no legislation that can prevent her from doing so if she desires. There are legislations that do provide him the ability to divorce her, if she does. In twenty years or so, Miss Granger will surely overturn those. I hear that she researches them in her spare time."

That was Hermione! Harry was proud of her. This could not wait for twenty years, though!

"Can't you talk to him?" Harry asked, looking at his cup.

"Harry, none can come between what God united," Voldemort said wryly.

He reached into the topmost drawer of his desk and took out a half-full plate of tarts. Harry took one and nibbled into it thoughtfully. That sounded Biblical, though he could not place the exact reference. Hermione probably could. He would ask her later.

"Why are you hiding tarts in there?" Harry asked. "These are very good tarts." They were freshly made too!

"I need to look untouchable in this room, behind this desk. I believe eating tarts when Griselda is sitting across me achieves the opposite results." Voldemort delicately dabbed his lips with a kerchief and picked up another tart. "Besides, this is a recent phenomenon. My spouse sends them from Scotland. My blood for his tarts."

Dumbledore made tarts? Harry needed to investigate that. He would beg the Headmaster to send him a package too! These were the yummiest tarts he had had in his life. He reached out to take another one. Berries burst ripe in his mouth. Looking at the bliss that washed over Voldemort's face as he bit into a tart, Harry thought it was a case of eating to alleviate stress. Who knew that Voldemort found the Ministry so stressful?

"I should go," Harry muttered, as he helped himself to another tart. "If you can't do anything about Mrs. Malfoy's situation, I don't want to waste your time more."

"My next meeting is about sports played on broomsticks," Voldemort said, displeased. "Stay and occupy me until it is over. Then Griselda can go to that meeting."

"Krum plays a sport on a broomstick," Harry pointed out. He felt awkward as soon as the words left his lips. He stuffed a tart into his mouth and poured himself coffee from the pot.

"So he does," Voldemort said nonchalantly. "Narcissa's mother was an old associate of mine. Narcissa is a woman of exemplary character, I have found. She has served my interests well over the years, unlike her husband. I will see what can be done. After all, monopolies, I was once told, are a bad state of affairs. Your clothing store breaks Madam Malkin's monopoly in this country. I must aid entrepreneurship and commerce, and the breaking of monopolies and the ushering in of a free market. It is the forty-fifth point on my manifesto."

"You remember your manifesto?" Harry asked, amazed.

"I wrote it when I was younger than you." Voldemort's gaze lost its sharpness for a moment. "I believed in it. I still do. Why wouldn't I remember it, Harry? It was all that made me strive to return, even when I was the meanest of spirits in forsaken forests."

And then Harry realised that Voldemort would submit to any marriage, to any number of meetings about sports played on broomsticks, to see his manifesto implemented in the country, to see his vision unfold into reality. He saw what the earliest of the Death Eaters must have seen; he saw a man with a purpose, a man who believed, a man who was convinced that his vision was indeed the best solution for all that ailed them. There was zeal in Voldemort's eyes, a zeal that Harry associated with men who had founded religions and multinational corporations, men who had fought wars to their bitter ends, and freed countries from oppression. This was the zeal of missionaries and inquisitors both, of tyrants and patriots both, of reformers and revolutionaries both.

"I thought I would never revise it. I thought a man who knew his purpose would not look back." Voldemort sighed. "The negotiations for the marriage required me to revise sixteen of them. I bitterly resent having had to change a dozen of them, I must admit. Yet, the others made me pause. I had changed my mind over the years, about those. It does not matter what they were. It matters that I had changed my mind, and that was alarming. I had not expected that I would change my mind, for had I not been sure, for had I not been certain, for had I not been born knowing that I was destined to bring my vision to life?"

Harry was fairly sure that Hermione and Ron were still together because they did not want to admit to themselves that they were not perfectly matched. They made it work, most of the time.

Hesitating to put his words into coherence, Harry picked another tart and nibbled on it. Then he said cautiously, "I think it is a good thing that you can actually see that you have changed your mind about something. It doesn't mean that your vision changed, or that your goals changed. It only means that what you considered to be your road towards your vision, towards your goals changed."

"I concede," Voldemort said thoughtfully. "I have to say that I envy you at times, and those like you. Your Quidditch career failed because of what happened to you, but you found something else to pour your energy into, and you found it motivating enough to care to be successful at it."

It was true. Harry cared about his shop now. He cared about what other people wore. He cared about competing with Madam Malkin. He looked at Voldemort's plain robes, old and nearly threadbare. The red silken blankets had suited the man more.

"I have always had it in me to be successful at most everything," Voldemort continued, his eyes looking into a distant past Harry could not see. "I knew that too. I could not, and I did not, pour myself into any of those possibilities, and I walked with my hands clenched tight towards this manifesto that had become my life's purpose. Nothing else captured my attention then."

"And now?" Harry asked, thinking about Krum.

"I am close to seeing it unfold," Voldemort said. "As close as Moses was to the promised land, I daresay. I dreamed of him last night. And like him, I wonder if I shall enter it. I have not found who killed Nagini."

"I am still here," Harry said wryly, patting his scar.

"Indeed you are," Voldemort allowed. He rose to his feet and stretched. Harry felt a lurch in his heart on seeing the man do something as mundane as that.

"Don't worry. You are doing fine. The people like you. Dumbledore doesn't complain too much about you too. He bakes you tarts!" And then, because a devil was in him, Harry offered, "I can give you a discount too, or maybe even a complimentary wardrobe. I am grateful that you will sort out Narcissa's issue. I think she will a big asset to my business."

"I have not seen a new robe in years," Voldemort said, his lips stretching to a wan smile. Harry found that fascinating, wanted that to linger. "As long as it is black."

"Your house is redder than my neighbour."

"You are situated beside the pleasure house, aren't you?" Voldemort asked, and he was still smiling in genuine amusement. "A strange place for an erstwhile hero to set up shop."

"Heroes and pleasure go together," Harry said cheekily, and immediately regretted the remark when Voldemort looked disconcerted.

"I have to admit that the red was not my choice," Voldemort said, contemplating the last tart on the platter. "There is only one left."

"Do you want to split it?" Harry asked. He often said the strangest things in Voldemort's presence, he was beginning to realise. He wondered why.

"Why not?" Voldemort asked, and the smile returned to his face, though it was tinged with irony and remembrance this time. "I split my soul with you. What is one tart more?"

Harry carefully broke the tart into two, and took a half. It was delicious, more so than the others, because it was the last one. Voldemort had not still touched his half. And the strange mixture of bravado and folly, that consumed Harry so whenever in Voldemort's company, made its appearance again. He took the remaining half between his fingers and held Voldemort's gaze as he rose to his feet and leaned over the table, to bring it to Voldemort's mouth. Voldemort's eyes betrayed a strange, strong emotion that Harry could not place, and when the man leaned to take Harry's offering, his lips brushed Harry's trembling fingers.

They heard Griselda's voice raised in the antechamber. Harry stepped back abruptly. Voldemort was not looking at him. Feeling dismissed, feeling gangly-limbed and at a loss for words, Harry made for the door. He did not look back.

—


	5. A storm bears them off like straw

"Inflation has fallen by 8%. Nearly thirty-three thousand new jobs have been created. Imports have been reduced by 44%. Exports have gone up by 12%. The Gringotts Gold Index has grown by 16%. As a nation, we are on a wave of prosperity we have not experienced before, not since the days of Arthur and Merlin. The marriage ushered in an era of peace and prosperity for our country." Griselda paused. Harry and Hermione were part of the huge crowd that thronged the atrium of the Ministry. They waited in anticipation for the rest of the speech. Griselda cleared her throat and continued, "Here is to a marriage that improved the lot of every citizen, regardless of his or her station in life. If ten years can bring us here, where will we be after fifty years? How magnificent and prosperous will be the world we leave for our children, and for their children?"

"Hear! Hear!" shouted the crowds, and fairies rained unicorn-shaped glittering confetti upon them all.

Hermione clutched Harry's hand, and brought her lips to his ear, and shouted over the crowd's tumult, "Oh, Harry! We are alive! You are alive!"

Harry felt it too, he felt her relief and his own, her surprise and his own. After ten years, the truth of it was sinking in. Dumbledore's sacrifice had brought them all their lives, to live free and to prosper, to put aside fear for their lives, to put aside fighting for grand and tragic causes, to focus on their small and petty problems, to focus on their small and shared joys, without worrying about a greater good.

He would have been the hero, tragic, who grew up in a cupboard, suffering under the hands of his relatives, having a blighted school career at Hogwarts, being hunted and singled out, dragging his friends to their graves with him, as he fought to the bitter end to make the prophecy come true. Dumbledore had spared him that.

Through the crowds, Harry could see Snape standing with Minerva. Snape's face had the selfsame expression of shock and realisation that Harry had. Snape had been spared too. Snape had been prepared to die a martyr. Instead, Dumbledore had stepped before them, sparing them with a vow that had held for ten years.

Dumbledore and Voldemort had never been present in the country during the anniversary celebrations. Dumbledore was usually off in sunny Bolivia with Minerva. Voldemort too fled to the Continent during the anniversary week. This year, the Daily Prophet had claimed breathlessly, both of them would make an appearance, together, at the celebrations held at the Ministry. So Harry had turned up with Hermione. Ron would also show up, later, once he had closed shop. There was to be a grand feast and plenty of merry-making.

"Harry, Hermione," said a voice Harry knew well.

"Viktor!" Hermione greeted him enthusiastically.

Harry nodded to Krum. He had seen Krum over the years, becoming more and more ensconced in his position as the Professor of Defence at Hogwarts, the darling of the students and well-spoken of by the staff. The Daily Prophet ran regular updates about Krum's continuing rapport with Voldemort.

Harry had dated Gwenog Jones for two years. It had gone well, until he had spent one Christmas morning at Hogwarts, eating tarts baked by Dumbledore, while Voldemort brewed and cast the treatment in his presence. When Harry had returned to his Camden flat, he had written a terse letter to Gwenog, breaking it off. The letter had made its way to the Daily Prophet and he had earned the ire of the public for breaking her heart in such a callous manner. Hermione and Ron had pestered him to explain his decision. He could not. How could he? How could he explain that eating tarts in Voldemort's presence somehow made more sense than going to Havana with Gwenog and applying suncream on her bronzed back?

He had dated Muggle girls on and off, but the secrecy requirements stifled his natural state of being and the relationships petered off as quickly as they had started.

Hermione was trying to set him up with Susan Bones. Susan was the sensible sort. Harry supposed that it was well worth a try.

"Ten years!" Griselda shouted, and stepped to the side of the podium.

And the entire atrium erupted into shouts of joy and triumph as Dumbledore and Voldemort stepped onto the stage together, though keeping their usual distance of five paces between them. Harry found himself clutching Hermione closer. Dumbledore was dressed in his usual bright array of colours, in shades of yellows and reds, in fabric woven at Harry's. Voldemort was in black, plain and drab, though the colour contrasted against his skin enough to put him in the limelight.

Dumbledore cast a Sonorous and spoke in a voice, firm and sure, "I wed him to save my students from fighting in a war that was not theirs, from dying in a war that was not theirs." His eyes roved about until they fell upon Snape. His smile was sad and beautiful as he continued, "They were brilliant and brave. I have seen many of my brilliant and brave students die." His eyes sought Harry, and Harry was trembling as he thought of James and Lily and Sirius. "I wanted them to go out and live their lives, to thrive away from causes and struggles that were not theirs to die for."

The crowd had fallen silent at the sombre words. Dumbledore then continued, "Now we are here. Now we are one. Now we are proud as a nation, celebrating the achievements of our children together, building our future together, investing in our future, repairing our past, and ensuring that everyone gets the opportunities they are entitled to, regardless of their ancestry or gender. Mere marriage could not have wrought that. No, it required great sacrifices and perseverance, a willingness to work with each faction and to understand the best course ahead, to be firm in times of irresoluteness and to be generous in times of scarcity, to be strong when the nation was weak and to be wise when there was pettiness. Our country needed greatness." Dumbledore turned to look at Voldemort. For once, there was no mockery in his gaze as he looked upon his spouse. He extended his hand and said quietly, and his words rung clear in the hush that had fallen upon the crowds, "Our country needed greatness. We needed you."

Voldemort looked taken aback for a moment. Beside Harry and Hermione, Krum was staring at the stage, enraptured. Harry felt pleasure and fear running through his scar. Voldemort was paranoid, no doubt expecting Dumbledore to say something mocking and condescending. Dumbledore said nothing more, instead patiently waiting with his hand outstretched. Voldemort stepped forward, and Harry could see he was struggling to stay grounded amidst the unexpected words Dumbledore had used. For good or worse, Dumbledore's opinion had always mattered to Voldemort, and he had made mountains of molehills when trying to interpret the Headmaster's actions throughout their lives.

Voldemort clasped Dumbledore's hand for an instant and let go. Then it was his turn to speak. He took out an old and yellow letter from his sleeve and cleared his throat. Harry realised that Voldemort was used to speaking to the Death Eaters, to his supporters and allies, and that he usually shied away from audiences as diverse as this day's. The audience, which had cheered Dumbledore loudly, had now fallen silent, and there was a hush in the air. Harry saw Lucius Malfoy standing near Voldemort, and whispering something in his ear patiently. Voldemort nodded and returned to his letter.

"We decided, ten years ago, to put aside our causes for the sake of our country. Albus wrote to me then, and his words spoke to me strongly that day just as they do today." Voldemort looked up and his gaze was intense as he faced the crowd. "Britain needs a sword and a shield, he said. He had been a shield, alone and at Hogwarts, defending for years. I had been a sword, alone and wandering, fighting for years. We could have continued as we were, fighting against each other, while foreign powers waited for our country to fall. We chose to wed sword to shield, to rebuild our country. Now we are sure. Now we are strong, economically and militarily. Now we can turn our attention outwards."

Hermione clasped Harry's hand. There was worry and uneasiness on most faces. Did Voldemort mean to go to war? There had been rumours that Voldemort's ambitions had turned international in scope, over the years.

"We are wizards. We are few, outnumbered by Muggles," Voldemort continued, eyes glittering in passion, and around Harry, people shifted restlessly. "We need to be united. We need to be economically self-sufficient. We need to teach our children to defend and to protect our legacy. Why do we seek to keep ourselves isolated from other Wizarding communities, in other countries? All magic is magic. It ties us together, and we must keep together in the coming years, as the Muggles expand across frontiers of science and technology. They will find us, and it will be during our lifetimes. Perhaps they will seek to collaborate with us, to understand magic, to understand our ways and culture. Perhaps they will seek to destroy us, as happened in the native civilizations they conquered in the Americas and Africa, in Asia and in Australia. Perhaps we will build great wonders that meld magic and technology together, and our children and theirs will live in harmony. Perhaps we will see another Hiroshima in one of our communities, as they show us that might is right. They fight over religions and races, they fight over resources and land. Who is to say that they will not fight us because of our magic, because of what marks us apart from them?"

"We must dissolve our borders," Voldemort said fiercely. "We shall foster collaborations and trade treaties with magical governments around the world. The great war with Grindelwald spilt wizarding blood. We shall have no wars between wizards! We are only few, and outside our conclaves, the Muggles are many. We shall increase our funding for all research departments, and create new departments to understand and develop Muggle technologies. Science and mathematics will be included compulsorily in our children's education at Hogwarts in the coming years. No child will grow up ignorant of what is outside our communities. It shall be his or her choice, to do business in Diagon Alley or to do business in Muggle London's Financial District, or to do business in Shanghai's wizarding trade centre. Harry's is a shining example of our values, of how we support free markets and competition, of how we support expansion and globalisation. We will empower our children to emulate that success, to thrive in both the worlds, and globally. We will empower them to stay safe and capable even if the worst comes to pass."

"We can now pursue our vision aggressively, because we are grounded in the present, because we are economically secure, because we are no longer a nation on the brink of a civil war." Voldemort turned to face Dumbledore. "For ten years, we have been a nation protected by sword and shield, willingly, everyday."

Dumbledore looked shaken by Voldemort's passion and fervor. The crowds were roaring in encouragement, and around Voldemort, many Death Eaters were clapping exultantly. This was the man that they had followed, through many years of bloodshed and living on the fringes of society. This was the man that they had worshipped, despite his increasing insanity and cruelty.

Hermione was clapping too, and there were tears on her cheeks.

"'Mione?"

"He is right, you know," she said, sobbing. "The walls will come down. The only choice we have is how we react. We are too few. Imperialism and colonialism showed us what Muggles do historically when they have power over each other. Why would this be any different? We need to be strong, we need to be able to blend in, we need to be able to make a living in both the worlds. And it is definitely stupid to go to war with other wizarding countries at this point. There is no threat there. The real threat is what will happen when the wall between Muggles and wizards comes down, and how wizards try to blend into that new world. Our reaction will make the difference between whether we get reduced to freakish tourist attractions, or become able and thriving members of the fused society."

Voldemort extended his hand to Dumbledore, just as the Headmaster had done earlier. Dumbledore hesitated, just as Voldemort had done earlier. They were alike, in many, many ways. Then Dumbledore clasped their hands together and brought his shrivelled palm to cup Voldemort's cheek. On one of the blackened fingers was the ring that had once held a horcrux. Voldemort did not flinch.

As Harry, Hermione, and Ron partied and made merry with the rest of their friends, nobody paid any attention to them. Nobody gawked at the scar. Rita made no attempt to get soundbites from them. Those who spoke to Harry complimented him about his new winter clothing line for men. Many were happy customers.

He was free.

Minerva was dancing with Dumbledore. Snape was standing and chatting with Rolanda Hooch, an unusual expression of serenity on his usually careworn features. Lupin was dancing with Tonks. Even Bellatrix, usually brooding and plotting, was dancing with her husband. Voldemort was nowhere to be seen.

"Employer-mine," Narcissa said sweetly, coming to Harry.

Hermione giggled and went to look for Ron. Harry's working relationship with Narcissa had become the stuff of Knockturn alley legend. Somewhere along the line, Harry was sure that she had become his employer, instead of the other way around. She was a demanding, bossy woman to work with. She knew what she wanted. She had excellent taste, and an astounding amount of common-sense for a trophy wife. Harry admired her sharp business acumen, which worked well in tandem with his street-smarts. They had built a business together that was slowly encroaching into Malkin's market share. Harry wanted to offer the common man an alternative to Malkin's. Narcissa wanted to buy Malkin's. Harry had tried explaining to her about the free-market and the badness of monopolies, just as Hermione had explained it to him. It had not made an impression on Narcissa. She knew only winning. She had convinced him to open a store in Paris, in Montmartre, right by the Seine, in the much-maligned red-light district. The store appealed to the bordellos in the region. Harry supposed there was some merit to Madam Malkin's criticism that he made clothes for sluts first and for respectable people later.

There was a tight ball of elation, furled, deep in his chest, as he thought about Voldemort's speech, about how Voldemort had called Harry's an example of their values. Harry had not wanted to open in Paris. It had been one of Narcissa's ideas that she refused to let go of until she got her way. Still, Voldemort had mentioned it so enthusiastically, publicly, and Harry was overjoyed.

"Employee-mine," Harry greeted Narcissa. She was a vision, in her bright yellow robes, dripping in diamonds. Lucius must own a mine.

"Dance with me," she asked imperiously.

Oh, she was a handful. Harry grinned at her and offered her his hand. One round about the dance floor would serve her right. He was a terrible dancer and he had seen Lucius dance.

She winced and held her tongue as they danced to a slow song.

"Are you genuinely this bad?" she asked as he clumsily messed up yet another half-turn.

"I am afraid so," he confessed. "I think I mentioned it in your employee contract."

"I knew I should have read it through!" she complained, before bowing out and leaving him alone, carrying herself quite properly despite her much stepped-upon feet. Her husband was waiting, an expression of concern softening his narcissistic, evil face.

—-

Harry made his way out for a smoke. He had picked up that bad habit from Narcissa. She said she had picked it up from her late father-in-law, who had been a chain smoker in the later phase of his life. Her husband did not approve of her vice, but he had always been an indulgent man where she was concerned, and had no trouble showering her in cigarettes that were low in nicotine and imported from exotic places. She shared her stash with Harry without compunction.

Harry did not like the smell in particular, but he liked the act itself. It felt rebellious and cool, something that Petunia would have disapproved of. Everyone he knew disapproved of it, including Ron. So he usually found dark corners to hide and indulge.

The arbour he found was deserted. There were fairy lights glowing soft here and there in the bushes. Harry lit up and blew a ring of smoke into the pure night air. It would go up and ruin the ozone layer Hermione cared about.

There was a sense of fate awakening in him, as he looked up at the clear skies, as ashes fell from his cigarette to the snow at his feet.

"She has many virtues and one vice," Voldemort said, walking to him. Harry sensed fate, just as he had sensed it when looking at the Goblet of Fire for the first time, just as he had sensed it when standing in the Hall of Prophecy. "You chose the vice."

"A grand speech," Harry said quietly. "You made believers out of them all."

"And you?" Voldemort wondered, drawing closer, leaving five feet between them, respectable enough by anyone's standards, and yet Harry felt as if they were in a forbidden situation, and fate prickled on his skin.

"You have been avoiding me," Harry muttered, dropping his cigarette stub and stamping the embers out with his boot.

Voldemort did not reply. Harry's frustration and confusion, which had lingered in him for a long time, which he had stewed over with the help of alcohol, which he had tried to distract himself with his shop, with his friends, returned in full force then. Voldemort knew. Harry knew that Voldemort knew. Voldemort knew what the root of Harry's inability to find satisfaction in his life was about. And all along, Voldemort had not stooped to telling him where to look for the answer he needed.

Hermione had told Harry that he needed to make terms with the fact that he was attracted to older women. Ron told Harry that it was because he had not still recovered from Cho. Molly had asked him if it was because he still carried the memories from the Dursleys. Dumbledore told him, in his usual, unhelpful, cryptic manner, that Harry had the answers in himself. Narcissa tried setting him up with Quidditch stars. That had been how he had met and fallen into a relationship with Gwenog. Harry had consulted a Muggle psychologist, who had listened to his story patiently, and then wondered if Harry nursed a crush on Krum. On Krum!

Ten years. Ron and Hermione had married. Everyone had married somebody. Everyone had somebody. Harry was still trudging alone, except for the occasional dates and flings, working hard in his shop, returning to his solitary digs in Camden, and wondering what was broken in him that he could not settle down and marry like his friends. There was a hollow feeling of loneliness each time he saw his friends, each time he saw Krum's name in the newspapers, each time he listened to Minerva speaking fondly about Dumbledore, each time he intervened in Ron's and Hermione's domestics. Dinners at the Weasleys made him feel isolated. All in all, he was sure that he had most in common with Snape, except he had never fallen in love with anyone the way Snape had. He did not have memories of love to cling to during cold and lonely nights in his bed, as he lay alone, his palm sticky with release unfruitful and unfulfilling. There was no house with a picket fence, no woman to welcome him home after a long day, no children to carry on his name.

Hermione said he was a sensitive man, and that women liked sensitive men. Molly said he was a catch. Narcissa concurred that he was highly eligible. Wasn't he successful? He was attractive enough, not having gained pounds the way his peers had. He respected women. He listened to them. He was alone. He had felt isolated each time he had seen Krum's face in the newspapers. The least alone he had felt had been in Dumbledore's office, two years ago, when he had watched Voldemort cast, when he had been eating fresh tarts that Dumbledore had baked for them. Voldemort had looked up at Harry, after the casting, and Harry had taken notice that there was a softness to Voldemort's gaze as he watched Harry eat the tarts. When Harry had smiled at him, Voldemort had looked away.

"You have been avoiding me!" Harry shouted at Voldemort, suddenly needing to vent his frustrations and anger. "You know something."

"I know nothing about you that you don't know already," Voldemort replied evenly. "I have to take my leave now. I am brewing and casting tonight. Don't smoke too much. Even magic can't cure lung cancer."

"Would serve you right if that happened to your life insurance," Harry muttered. Voldemort did not rise to the bait, choosing to walk away, leaving Harry alone in the cold night.

—-

Fawkes woke Harry that night.

"Hey," Harry greeted the phoenix blearily, pushing his glasses onto his nose and looking at the clock. Three in the morning.

Fawkes looked at him solemnly. Worried for Dumbledore, Harry hastily threw on some clothes and touched the bird's tail. He was taken to Hogwarts.

Dumbledore waited at the gates, alone, looking wretched and tired, at odds with the colourful, festive robes he wore.

"What is it?" Harry asked, rushing to his side.

"Viktor hasn't returned to the Castle tonight," Dumbledore explained. Fawkes trilled in sympathy. "Severus saw him leaving the festivities early. Voldemort is here, casting still. I am worried, Harry. I feel that something is you stay here? He is tired after the casting. Keep him company. I need to go to London to alert Griselda and Mr. Malfoy. Severus is in Hogsmeade, searching. If you need anything, alert Minerva or Hagrid."

Harry nodded and made his way up the grounds, past the lake, to the Castle. He ran up the stairs to Dumbledore's office, past the gargoyle. Magic, familiar and powerful, made the hairs on his neck stand up as he opened the door softly. Voldemort's face was in profile, as he faced the fire, as he cast speaking words in that old, dead language, unaware of what had worried Dumbledore. He was in his own world, away from them, wreaking magic effortlessly and efficiently as only he was capable of.

Harry watched him quietly, and thought about Krum all the while. He knew why Dumbledore was worried. Krum was not the sort to go anywhere without giving ample notice to his employer, to his lover. Krum was steady and responsible. Hermione said that ever so often. Harry's thoughts moved away from Krum to softer, gentler places in his heart, as he watched Voldemort's intense expression of focus. Voldemort's voice was awakening a sense of comfort in Harry, and the loneliness that had become an elemental part of him retreated awhile as he basked in the magic.

The words petered out, and the flames danced merrily on Voldemort's tired face. He opened his eyes to look at Harry, and surprise dawned on his features.

"Dumbledore had to leave on an errand," Harry explained softly, not wanting to disrupt the serenity after the casting. "He asked me to stay in case you needed anything."

"He must have roused you from your sleep," Voldemort murmured, looking at the clock that was striking five on the wall. "Why?"

The door opened then and Dumbledore walked in then, followed by Lucius Malfoy. They looked at each other for a moment, before Lucius stepped forward, grim of demeanor, and said quietly, "My lord, we found Viktor Krum in a dockyard in Swindon."

Voldemort's expression morphed from curiosity to alarm. Clearing his throat, he asked in a voice weakened by the long casting, "And?"

"He was found dead," Lucius said softly, as if not wanting to spook Voldemort. Voldemort looked away from Lucius to Dumbledore, and his expression turned to resignation when he saw the grief on Dumbledore's features.

"He was murdered," Voldemort stated.

Lucius did not reply to that. Neither did Dumbledore. They stayed there, all four of them, in silence while Fawkes shifted restlessly.

Then Snape entered the room and said gravely, "The Aurors are here with the body. They want someone to identify the corpse."

"At least they left me something to bury," Voldemort said in a strangled voice.

"I will be there shortly," Dumbledore said. "Lucius, perhaps you should accompany me to oversee the official proceedings."

Lucius nodded abruptly, and with one last frightened glance at Voldemort, followed Dumbledore out of the room. Snape stood there still, hesitating, until he nodded to himself as if making up his mind, and walked closer to Voldemort. He opened his palm. On it, Harry saw a locket green.

"It is not destroyed," Voldemort murmured, reaching out, feeling the magic that lingered in it strong.

"He must have chosen death over surrendering it," Snape told him. "He flung it into the Thames. I was able to retrieve it, afterwards."

Krum had chosen to die alone in a dockyard rather than to surrender the locket. And Snape had not destroyed it either. Snape had not handed it over to Dumbledore. Or had Dumbledore known?

"Why?" Voldemort wondered aloud, bewildered. "It held no part of me, anymore. It was only a trinket of acknowledgement, of shared memories."

"He must have held that dear, then," Snape said with unusual gentleness, looking very much like a man who knew what he spoke of, like a man who had loved dearly that he had held the smallest trinket valued above his own life. "Take it, my lord."

Voldemort shook his head but took the locket with trembling fingers, staring at it as if it was a basilisk. Snape retreated and closed the door behind him. Voldemort's fingers closed convulsively over the locket and he looked up at Harry, face full of loss and longing, anguish and resentment and fear mixing in his eyes.

"You must be happy," Voldemort accused him.

Harry had despised Krum, he realised then. He had despised Krum each time he had seen the latter, each time he had heard about Krum in the newspapers or from Dumbledore or from Hermione. He had despised Krum until Dumbledore had told him that the man had gone missing. How could he despise Krum now, when he had been murdered in a dockyard for refusing to surrender a locket that Krum must have been aware had held no horcrux, for a locket that had only been a trinket of affection shared between lovers?

They had struck where it would hurt the most, when it would hurt the most. Voldemort's speech had been grand and full of passion. He had roused a fire in the hearts of their citizens. Now everyone would be shaken, be less sure, for how could Voldemort carry them to their brilliant future if he could not even keep his lover safe?

"He loved you," Harry said, and his voice was breaking on the words even though they were the truth, perhaps because they were the truth.

When Voldemort clutched the locket to his breast and closed his eyes in anguish, Harry knew the answer to the question that had kept him frustrated and alone for years. He did not speak a word more. He had nothing to say that would console. He took his leave quietly, and had to steel himself when he heard Voldemort's breath hitch as the door closed behind him.

—-

Krum's funeral was well-attended. Multitudes thronged the grounds of Hogwarts. Krum's father had wanted nothing to do with his queer son. Dumbledore had said then that Krum would be interred at Hogwarts, as befitted him for the services he had done for the school. Krum's mother had arrived, sad of face and small of stature, to attend her son's funeral. Minerva had received her.

The students were there too, in black robes, in mourning. Krum had been their favourite teacher, voted the best teacher for ten years in a row. His previous students, those who had left Hogwarts, had also returned with their families, to mourn him. Many of the Quidditch players who had been peers and friends had come too, to pay their respects. Hermione was there, crying into Ron's shoulder.

The staff of Hogwarts, all of whom had liked and respected Krum for his steadfastness and work ethics, had turned up. Flitwick was sobbing into his small kerchief and Hagrid was sobbing into his large kerchief. Minerva's eyes were red and Snape looked as haunted as he had in the days leading up to the war that had not come to pass.

Dumbledore was dressed in robes of muted grey and was gently comforting a few First Year girls who were hysterical.

"Harry," Narcissa said, coming to him. She was dressed in black, and Harry could see a resemblance to Bellatrix finally.

"Such a tragedy," she said quietly. "Just like the last time."

"The last time?" Harry asked, turning to face her. She looked frightened.

"The Dark Lord's last lover was killed in Knockturn Alley shortly before you were born, in the thick of the war," she whispered, looking about to make sure that nobody was eavesdropping. "Lucius said that there was nothing left to bury."

"Knockturn Alley?" Harry asked, a sick feeling rising in his chest.

"In broad daylight, they say. By the Aurors, they say," Narcissa hesitated. "Aid arrived too late and there was nothing left of him, not even bones. I was not told a great deal. I had been pregnant and my husband did not wish to upset me then. The tale of the Dark Lord meeting his lover had been a story I had heard at my parents' knees, in my childhood. He had been young and poor. His lover had been a guest at the bordello. Satisfied with none of the courtesans there, the man had stepped out into the street, just as the Dark Lord had stepped out from Borgin's. That had not been the first time they had seen each other, but that had been the first time that they had truly seen each other. It lasted until that fateful day, for nearly thirty-five years."

"Who was it?" Harry asked in a hush.

"I cannot tell you," she said sadly. "It is not worth his wrath. He has held us all to the promise to not speak of that name. Damnatio memoriae, except it was not a condemnation, but only a way to cope."

Voldemort's comment the previous night, about having something left to bury, then made sense. Harry sighed as he watched Krum's mother weep into Dumbledore's robes, inconsolable. Voldemort had made a brief appearance, before leaving abruptly, letting Lucius Malfoy and Dumbledore deal with the rest of the proceedings.

After everyone had left, after Krum's mother had been coaxed away by Dumbledore gently to the warmth of the Castle, Harry walked down the meadows to the snow-covered grave. There was a single cross on the headstone, testifying to Krum's parents' faith, and there was no epitaph on the tomb. Harry wondered glumly if they would have made good friends if not for Krum's choice in lover, if not for Harry's confusion about his needs in life. It was too late. He walked away from the tomb, sad of heart, wretched and desolate. Halfway to the Castle, he turned back to see a figure in black kneeling by the grave, head bowed, and wand outstretched. Alarmed that Voldemort would try to animate the corpse for some obsessive purpose, Harry rushed back, only to find that the wand had made an inscription on the headstone.

"Hardly are they planted, hardly are they sown, hardly has their stem taken root in earth, when he blows upon them and they dry up, and the storm bears them off like straw," Voldemort murmured, still kneeling.

"Death?" Harry asked softly.

"Death, Fate, God, does this evil need a name?" Voldemort wondered. His voice was thick with grief and tiredness. "We strive and strive, but everything we dare is still subject to this evil's whim. We are glass shards breaking, grass withering, flowers fading, only wind blowing, only dust returning to dust, only fleeting dreams."

Snow fell upon them soft. Harry gripped the man's right shoulder and said, "What did you inscribe?"

Voldemort hesitated, before swallowing and saying, "I am Levski, the one and the same."

"Levski?" Harry asked.

Voldemort's voice held steady as he explained, "He is called the greatest Bulgarian that lived, striving against the Ottoman empire. He was in exile for ten years, they say. He was betrayed to the oppressors. They tortured him when they found him, in cruel ways. He held to his truth until he was killed."

Harry did not know what to say. So he knelt beside the man and said quietly, "He held to his truth too. Valiantly."

"Yes," Voldemort said tiredly. He sunk down beside the grave and leaned his head against it. "Go home, Harry. Let me have this night here."


	6. Whoever goes down to Sheol

Harry did not think much of Narcissa's latest scheme.

"Idea!" she interjected.

"Scheme," he retorted.

"Think about it, Harry!" she said, eyes all ablaze with the wickedness of her devious scheme. "We buy stocks of Malkin's, targeting only those sellers who have significant market share, until we are the majority stakeholder."

"I like competition. No monopolies. Monopolies are bad, remember?" Harry asked to no avail. Oh, she was like a dog with a bone, once she had her mind set upon something. "Too nefarious, Narcissa. This is a Gryffindor-Slytherin operation. And the Gryffindor says no!"

"You just like losing," she muttered, tossing her dainty head and walking away.

He rolled his eyes and turned his attention back to the inventory she could not be arsed to do on time. She said it was beneath her. Her hoity-toity husband had utterly spoiled her. Hermione said that Harry should withhold these infractions from Narcissa's salary. Harry had grinned and told her that it would snow in hell before Narcissa let that happen. For a trophy wife, she had a surprising sense of her market value. And Harry preferred to have her with him, than against him. Poor Madam Malkin still had no idea how Harry was getting ahead so successfully.

Harry poured himself a cup of coffee and settled down in the store's back room to take inventory. He glanced up at the clock. It was five to midnight. The employees had the week off, as he had not wanted to infringe on their Christmas holidays. It was a busy week, but he was used to manning the store alone on busy days. Narcissa occasionally helped out in the front, and she was an excellent saleswoman when she was available, but she was unreliable, especially during this season when she had too many festivities to plan.

There was a ring at the door. He sighed and rubbed his eyes. It must be yet another drunken patron of the bordello, mistaking his shopfront for the pleasure house's. He rose to his feet and stretched. At least it would help him postpone the boring inventory. He already had the suspicion that the tally would not even out. It never did, in his experience, but he preferred seeing a roughly even tally. His days of being near broke were behind him, thanks to Narcissa's devious marketing methods, but he still feared penury and Gringotts goblins coming to foreclose on his shop. Hermione said that his fears were ungrounded, that he watched too many Muggle reality TV shows. She must be right.

He opened the door to find Voldemort sitting huddled up on his steps, thin robes providing little insulation from the cold winds and the snow. Not a drunken patron seeking his neighbour's door then.

There were Christmas merry-makers farther off in Diagon Alley and Harry could hear their voices shouting carols drunken. Here, though, in Knockturn, all was quiet and dark and deserted, except the sleazy music and red lights and nude figures against the gauzy curtains in his neighbour's building. There was snow on Voldemort's robes and snow on the stairs.

"Come in," he told Voldemort quietly and he realized that his fingers were shaking.

He had not seen the man except in passing at Hogwarts, when visiting Dumbledore. Dumbledore himself had sounded uncertain of Voldemort's state of health over the last year, though the affairs of the state were being carried out with the usual adherence to protocol and timeliness, thanks to the well-oiled machinery that Voldemort and Griselda had built over the past many years.

Narcissa had told Harry that the Dark Lord was in one of his introspective spirals, withdrawing deeper and deeper to be alone with his thoughts, and that this was normal for him. She had not sounded bothered by it.

There had been no flashes of wrath or insanity passing pain to Harry through the scar. All had been quiet and uneventful on that front.

Voldemort looked up at Harry and rose to his feet. Harry winced as he noted how Voldemort's robes lay loose on his frame.

"You are only skin over bones," he noted, stepping aside to let Voldemort in, and closing the door behind him to shut out the noises of pleasure from his neighbour's establishment. "Come in, come in, let me just throw some more logs on the fire. Coffee? Oh, you don't like Tesco's. Never mind. Let me make some hot chocolate. You look frozen to the bones. Where is your winter cloak?"

Voldemort turned to look at him. There was a quietness to him, an inevitability sitting stamped on his features, that made Harry flinch and take a step backward. Harry walked out to the backroom, where he had a little stove. He made the hot chocolate mechanically, and added a dash of brandy for good measure. Then he went to Voldemort and handed him the mug. Then he threw more logs onto the fire.

"I had to bring you the news," Voldemort murmured, warming his fingers on the mug, inhaling the aroma of the drink. "Harry, the treatment has been failing. It has become ineffectual over the past two moons."

"He knows," Harry said flatly. Dumbledore always knew.

"Yes."

"And he sent you to tell me!" Harry ranted, riled up that Dumbledore had again chosen to not speak to Harry directly, saddened that the reprieve they had bought with blood had not lasted, frightened at the prospect of losing Dumbledore, at the prospect of living in a world without Dumbledore.

"I chose to tell you," Voldemort said then. He hesitated and took a deep breath, before placing his palm on Harry's right wrist, squeezing awkwardly, as if to provide a measure of solace. "I will not neglect you."

Harry's anger and frustration, his grief and longing, brewing and stewing deep in himself over many nights spent alone in his bed, came to the fore.

He wrenched his hand away from Voldemort's clasp and shouted, "Neglect me?" He inhaled a lungful of air to continue. "Neglect me? You avoided me for years! You are coming to me, telling me that Dumbledore is going to die, and telling me that you won't neglect me! You have neglected me for years and I don't even understand why!"

"The last year was difficult-" Voldemort began evenly, sanctimoniously, no doubt determined to make it all seem as if Harry was overreacting.

"And the years before that?" Harry spat. A burning sensation was rising in his throat, at the corners of his eyes, and the anguish of years demanded an outlet. "You knew what I felt, you knew it before I did! You avoided me! If I weren't your horcrux, you would be avoiding me still!"

"If you weren't that, I would have dared be bolder," Voldemort said quietly, looking at the bales of clothing on Harry's shelves. "Harry, my soul is wound with yours. It is that causing you to feel so. It is not you. This truth is not your truth."

"Look at me!" Harry demanded. "The least you can do is to look at me!"

Voldemort looked at him then, and said impassively, betraying no emotion, "Ever since I stepped out of that cauldron, I have looked at you. I have watched you grow into the man that you are today. I am proud, even if I played no part in your success. You are a self-made man. You ought to be proud of that."

"Stop changing the topic!" Harry exclaimed, walking to Voldemort and grabbing him by the lapels.

He tore the fabric with his grip. Hot chocolate scalded them both, the cup crashed at their feet and Harry was thankful that the ceramic did not break, and Voldemort tried to shift backwards, but Harry kept him where he was, still gripping him.

"And you should use the discount I gave you to buy yourself some bloody new robes!"

Voldemort's face registered surprise at Harry's strength, before it changed into soft amusement. He gently placed his hands over Harry's and moved them away from his torn robes. Gently, carefully, he brought his fingers to Harry's chin and peered into Harry's eyes.

"I cannot discuss this further," he said calmly. "My reason has always been the same. You hold my soul. Any homosexual inclination you feel is only because of that reason."

That did not make sense. Harry's mind clamoured to interpret what Voldemort had meant, and failed. There was something Voldemort was not speaking of, there was something that Harry had not been able to see yet.

And then the weight of Voldemort's news bore down upon Harry, suffocating him. He was crying, he realised, and buried his face in Voldemort's torn robes. His cheek touched warm skin as he pressed closer, craving something he did not yet understand. Voldemort was still, neither pushing him away nor speaking. Then he exhaled and brought a hand to Harry's head hesitantly, to streak his fingers roughly through Harry's mop of hair.

"There is nothing more we can do, then?" Harry asked, thinking of Dumbledore's bright, blue eyes, thinking of poor, dear Minerva, choking down sobs.

"I will not neglect you," Voldemort murmured, finally bringing his arms around Harry, and his words were vow and sentence both. Harry's grief settled from a raging sea at storm to a placid sadness when Voldemort pressed his lips to his forehead in a tentative, barely felt motion.

Then, when Harry cleared his throat, embarrassed at his outburst, saddened by the news, and mortified by Voldemort's casual explaining away of what Harry felt even if he understood very little, when he strove to move away, Voldemort gripped his shoulder and said, "This will pass, Harry."

"Why?" Harry asked, frustrated.

He had had years to think about all of it. He had had years to dwell in himself, alone and cold, and needy for something he had never known. If it had not changed over these years, why did Voldemort believe that it would pass?

"When Krum wanted you, when you felt the same, you didn't care about the motivations or the risks."

Sadness and bereavement darkened Voldemort's face when he listened to Harry speak of Krum.

He pulled himself together, admirably, to reply, "Viktor was not as important as you are, in the grand picture." He shook his head, as if at a loss to explain himself in a clearer manner. "Only think of what you are, Harry. Albus gave up a war for you."

"He is dying!" Harry exclaimed, tired of it all.

Dumbledore was dying. Harry was alone. Voldemort refused to acknowledge him because he did not want to compromise his grand plans for the wizarding world.

"I cannot," Voldemort said flatly. "You have always been fiercely protected, and by many more than merely Albus. I cannot endanger my dreams, not when I am so close to seeing them come to fruition."

—-

During one of Harry's frequent visits to Hogwarts, he chanced to see Voldemort in Dumbledore's office, brewing.

"Don't waste your blood," Dumbledore chided him, as he came into the room with a platter of freshly baked tarts. He scooped half of the tarts and placed them on a plate.

"It will make the difference between suffering to death on your bed and suffering to death on your feet," Voldemort replied.

"You think of everything," Dumbledore said, and there was both mockery and fondness in his voice. "My days fly faster than a weaver's shuttle, and come to their end when the thread runs out."

"Consider that my life is but wind. Your eye will seek me, but I shall be gone. As a cloud fades away, So whoever goes down to Sheol does not come up," Voldemort finished easily.

"I shall not live forever; let me be, for my days are a breath," Dumbledore said, and there was both teasing and knowledge in his gaze then. Voldemort frowned and returned to his brewing. Harry wondered what that had meant.

"For Minerva?" Harry asked, helping Dumbledore transfer the rest of the tarts onto a beautiful silver platter.

His policy was to ignore all references to Dumbledore's imminent death. He pretended that he knew nothing about it when others discussed the matter before him. He ignored how Minerva's appearance had become more and more gaunt over the days. He ignored how Narcissa complained about Snape missing meals and reassuming the martyred look he had over the war years. He ignored how Remus and Ron and Hermione worried a lot in their conversations about Dumbledore. He ignored the allusions in the newspapers about the Headmaster's declining health. He ignored Dumbledore's frail form that was only held together by his will and Voldemort's blood.

"Yes, for Minerva," Dumbledore said softly. "She has not been faring well."

Dumbledore, being Dumbledore, could not let anything rest. He knew that Harry was in denial, and he fretted about that, and his solution was to somehow make Harry acknowledge that he was dying.

Harry did not think that ploy was going to work. He had extensive experience with the art of denial.

"Perhaps you should speak with Severus, Harry," Dumbledore persisted. "The two of you have a great deal in common."

While Snape loved Dumbledore as much as Harry did, that was about the extent of what they had in common.

"All they have in common is us," Voldemort pointed out. "Hardly the best basis for making bosom acquaintances."

"We are married," Dumbledore retorted. "A very good basis indeed, seeing that it holds our world together!"

When Voldemort glanced at him, Harry felt flayed, and all the emotions that lay festering in him woke again.

"Really, Albus, let him be. Go bed the cat. I will leave the potion on your desk before I leave. Thank you for the tarts."

Consideration? From Voldemort? Harry was furious. The man had no difficulty in avoiding Harry when he so chose.

"As you wish," Dumbledore said cheerfully. "Harry, help me down the stairs, won't you? Severus refused to mend my bones if I topple down again."

As Harry helped Dumbledore down the stairs, the Headmaster leaned into him heavily, and asked, "How are you, my boy?"

"I am fine," Harry muttered. "I don't want to discuss your health. I really don't."

He could not cope with that. He did not want to confront that truth.

"I will not tell you what to feel, Harry," Dumbledore said then, as if Harry had not said anything about his health. "Your sensitivity and empathy has led you to try to help those who weren't ready to be helped. You have a wholeness to you. It has attracted emotionally weak men and women to you in the past, seeking your company to soothe their needs and emptiness. It has made you the target of bullying in the past."

Was that his saviour complex that Ron derided so? Was that Hermione meant when she said Harry was too giving of himself?

"You have looked for strength to match yours, for love to match yours," Dumbledore continued, wistfully. "I remember what it was like to be young, to be in a place similar to yours, Harry. I wasted many years on a man who was emotionally unstable, and unable to reciprocate in ways that I gave my affection and attention. The experience left me hollow, for many years, until Minerva came to me a lifetime later."

Grindelwald. Harry swallowed. There was a theme there, wasn't it? Grindelwald had ruined Dumbledore, they said. And here Dumbledore was, speaking of how Minerva had rebuilt him emotionally. Harry knew Minerva. He knew her strength and her implacability. He knew how she had stood by Dumbledore, through the war, through the troubles with the Ministry, through the negotiations and the marriage. He knew that a woman like her was rare.

"He thinks it is because of the horcrux."

"He knows that has nothing to do with the matter," Dumbledore chided Harry gently.

"He thinks it will pass," Harry muttered. "I hope that he is right, especially now that you have warned me about what happened to you."

He was glad that Dumbledore was not discussing his health. He was not glad that Dumbledore had found an equally troublesome topic to roost on.

"Oh, I don't find our mutual friend lacking in emotional balance," Dumbledore said thoughtfully. "He could not have inspired devotion if he had not been able to empathise. He could not have inspired love if he had not been able to relate. He could not have sustained a relationship if he had not been able to reciprocate. He is not emotionally unstable, Harry. His mental state is delicate, I grant. It has always been so. Inbreeding can do that to a man."

Insanity was as bad as emotional deficiencies, wasn't it? Harry rued the day he had first looked at Voldemort as a human, as something other than the alien villain Dumbledore had married for the sake of peace.

"I cannot say that I will celebrate any progress on this matter," Dumbledore said, in a tone of finality. "There are many others better suited to you."

—-

The days went on. Harry kept shop and tried to hold Narcissa's demented plans of expansion in check. He went to Hogwarts, and had tea and tarts with Dumbledore every week. He took walks with Minerva. It had been Hermione's idea. She had thought that they should spend more time with Minerva, to make her feel less bereft of company when the time came.

When Snape's owl came, it was in the middle of the night. Harry knew, before he unfurled the scroll, what the contents would be. He threw on his clothes and made his way to Hogwarts. There were many gathered in the Entrance Hall. More men and women were trudging up from the gates to the castle.

Harry made his way through the throng to the gargoyle-guarded stairs. The entrance lay open. His heart thudded in sorrow. The password held no meaning when the owner had left. Up and up the stairs he went, and he remembered all the times he had bounded up and down, without a care in the world, knowing that the Headmaster would make everything all right in the end.

The room was crowded. Kingsley and Rufus. Remus. Griselda was standing beside Voldemort and speaking with him. Malfoy was there. Amelia stood off to a side, her face pensive and full of mourning.

Owls, native and foreign, flew in, bearing official-looking scrolls, and carried them to Voldemort. Official expressions of sympathy extended to the bereaved Minister from other countries, Harry realised. Griselda was collecting the scrolls methodically.

A door to the side, leading to the inner chambers, opened, and Snape came out leading Minerva. She held herself stiffly and with pride, despite the tears that streaked her face. The room fell silent.

"My condolences, Minerva," Voldemort said, amidst all the owls and the scrolls. "The Ministry extends our aid to any arrangements the Board of Governors may wish to make for the funeral."

"He wanted to have his ashes scattered in the Danube," Minerva said stiffly. "I doubt the Board will let that happen."

Amelia looked scandalised. Dumbledore's ill-fated saga with Grindelwald was well-known, but it would not sit well with anyone to have his ashes scattered in Grindelwald's motherland.

"Hogwarts Headmasters are interred at Hogwarts," Rufus said. "It is tradition. We can make an exception for Albus. The public will have our heads, though. They will want his grave in Britain, at Hogwarts. He belonged to the country, and to the school."

Dumbledore had always been larger than a mere man. He had been a national institution, all by himself, Harry realised. He had been their saviour twice, first defeating Grindelwald at the Danube, and then marrying for the sake of the country. Harry thought of Krum, who had been buried at Hogwarts, because Dumbledore had intervened when Krum's father had refused to have his body buried in Bulgaria.

"He belonged to the country, and to the school, when he was alive," Harry said uncomfortably. He did not wish to speak before all of them, but he wanted to see Dumbledore's wishes carried out. "He lived for others. Let us repay him at least now. This is the only thing he asked for. If he wanted it to be the Danube, so be it. We owe him that much."

—

He was alone in his little Camden flat, sitting up in bed, drinking lukewarm coffee. They had been denied even the closure of a funeral.

He had not seen the body. Not many had. Minerva had not wanted to make it a spectacle. She had protected Dumbledore's privacy as best as she could, until they cremated the corpse at daybreak. Then she had left for the Continent alone, bearing the ashes.

It would be on the front pages of the newspapers. They were declaring a national holiday, a day of mourning. Ron and Hermione would soon come looking for him, he knew, as soon as they read the newspapers.

He clutched his mug tighter and pulled the blankets about his feet. All hell would break loose, soon, and he needed fortitude that the coffee could not provide.

There was a knock at his door. He took a deep breath. He needed to be strong, if it was Hermione. She would need him to be strong. She had idolised Dumbledore.

It was Voldemort, at his doorstep. He stepped aside and noticed that he was wearing his holey pyjamas. Never mind that. Voldemort was wearing his threadbare robes.

"You really should use that discount I gave you," Harry muttered. He padded to the kitchenette and took the Harrods' reserve he had fallen into the habit of buying for guests, though he liked the Tesco's blend for himself.

"Come with me," Voldemort asked.

"I have to —" Harry began, only to have his words peter out into silence, only to have his throat choke up with grief.

"Come with me," Voldemort asked again. "You don't need to be alone, here."

—

In September, the moors were still desolate and bleak. There were storms gathering from the clouds drawing inland. Yet there was brightness too, in heather covering the lands, in the sheep that dotted the heather, and in the streaks of sunlight shining through the grey skies.

"Do you like the climate?" Harry asked, following Voldemort down the moor-path towards the house he had been to once before, when he had been drunk and Voldemort had been trying to not die.

"When I bought the house, many years ago, it was in the middle of a recession." Voldemort paused at the door and unearthed a ancient key from his robes. "This had been what I could afford. As time passed, the location began to exert a charm on me. The locals here say that once the moors take hold of you, you will not want to live anywhere else. I daresay they may have been referring to the quicksand in the bogs."

Inside there was still red everywhere. There were books lying askew on the chaise and on the side-tables. There were even some on the carpet. Harry picked them up, one by one, and arranged them neatly in a stack on the chaise.

"Do you like red?" Harry asked, wanting to fill the numbness and the hollowness inside with random trivia, wanting to forget about Minerva making that journey to the Continent alone.

"When I met my first lover, he was leaving a pleasure house. We had nowhere to go. I was penniless and had no legacy. His family would have had me killed, had they known. So we met at the bordello, and paid the pimps and the prostitutes to keep our secrets. I suspect the nostalgia overpowered his sensibilities, when it came to decorating."

This was the man who had died in Knockturn Alley. There had been nothing left of him to bury. Narcissa had said that it had lasted for nearly thirty-five years.

"Until then, I had suspected that I was incapable of sexual desire," Voldemort said abruptly. "There had been no desire to experiment, and it had been incongruous at a time when all my peers indulged recklessly."

Had he felt left behind? Harry felt left behind by his peers these days. He looked closely at Voldemort. There was encouragement lingering in Voldemort's gaze. An encouragement to ask more? An encouragement to act?

"Do you feel the draw?" Harry blurted out, and immediately felt stupid and rejected.

"Yes," Voldemort said, without a second's hesitation. "Do you remember the first time you brewed the cure? I had finished casting, and I had been unsettled, because having someone's gaze on me while casting unsettles me. I had cast wards to keep out ambient magic, to keep out another's magic, and found that your magic lay heavy upon mine still. You healed my hand, and your touch woke in me a yearning."

"I had been a mess after Cho. Your casting healed me," Harry remembered. "I felt whole and clean again."

"Ours is a compatibility woven of our magic and our minds," Voldemort explained, not unkindly. "I cannot deny that it is intense. I cannot claim that it is more than what it is."

"It is more than what I have had before," Harry said bitterly, thinking of fumblings in the dark, thinking of Cho, thinking of flames that had been snuffed out fast. Nothing, nobody, had held a candle to Voldemort. He knew himself well enough to accept that would not change.

"You are young."

"Can we at least try? Once? I will never bring it up again," Harry pleaded, knowing that Voldemort would say no, knowing that Voldemort would be as obstinate in his refusal as Harry was in his pursuit.

Voldemort did not reply immediately and his gaze was pensive as he looked at the moorlands through the large windows. Oh, he was so starkly beautiful, in that starkly beautiful land, against the reds and the bleak greys.

Daring some, daring all, Harry stepped forward and placed his fingers on the lapels of Voldemort's robes. Voldemort did not move his hands away. He merely closed his eyes and exhaled, and then brought his fingers over Harry's, and led him to untie the intricate knots that held the robes closed.

Harry did not speak, afraid to break the strange accord that Voldemort had acceded. He did not speak when Voldemort's robes slipped down his shoulders and fell at their feet. He did not speak as he drank in the sight of that pale torso he had seen once contrasted against red silk, that he had seen once before emerging from a cauldron. He did not speak as he moved his hands further down, to the untie the drawers that obscured the lower half still.

"Harry-"

"I won't hurt you," Harry swore, wanting to be trusted, needing a chance, at least once, to show what he carried in his soul.

Amusement replaced the hesitation in Voldemort's eyes. Oh, what was so amusing? Harry shook his head and returned his attention to the stays. His fingers were shaking badly. The drawers pooled down too, and Harry stepped back to gaze at the man he had wanted to see for so long.

Voldemort took a few shallow breaths, restless under Harry's gaze, and then cleared his throat to ask hoarsely, "Are you still convinced of your inclinations, then?"

"I have never wanted anything more," Harry confessed easily. "Can we, please?"

"Lead on, then. You know where my bedroom is."

Oh, Voldemort wanted him to initiate. Voldemort did not want to start anything Harry would balk at. He was still unconvinced about Harry's latent homosexuality. He must believe still that it was a consequence of the soul Harry bore.

Suddenly frightened at the import of what it meant, Harry asked, "You do want this, though?"

"I cannot conceal my want from you, not now, not when stripped naked before you."

That was true. Harry suppressed a blush. Women were more complicated, in that he could never really tell if they wanted him or not. Harry walked to the bedroom. There were still red silken sheets on the large bed. He felt shy, all of a sudden, as he moved to take his shoes off.

"Don't take off your clothes," Voldemort told him, slipping between the sheets, invoking decadent images in Harry's mind. "Come here. And relax, Harry. Your thoughts are scattered."

"Stay out of my mind," Harry said hopelessly, scrambling onto the bed, across the slippery sheets, to where Voldemort was ensconced in the middle.

"What of the matters you dare not ask me for?" Voldemort asked, eyes lidded as he perused Harry. "You don't wish me to see what you desire? You don't wish me to know that you want to tie me down so that you can touch me as you please, as you have wanted to for years?"

"Yes," Harry hissed, emboldened by Voldemort's provocative words, emboldened by how Voldemort reached across the bed to fetch a jar of petroleum jelly and to place it beside Harry, emboldened by how Voldemort clasped his hands and offered them to Harry.

Harry summoned the nearest red pillow and stripped it of its silken cover. He had left his wand on the chaise. So he ripped the fabric apart at the seams, and then tore it into thin strips. Voldemort's eyes widened in surprise at Harry's actions. Oh, but Harry had waited so long, and he did not want to plod back to find his wand, and he did not want to take his eyes off the vision before him. He hastily made a knot to bind Voldemort's wrists together. He looked up to find uncertainty in Voldemort's eyes. Feeling out of his element, feeling reckless, Harry moved upwards with a strip of fabric and placed it over Voldemort's eyes. The sharp inhalation of surprise that it triggered was followed by an instinctive jerk away.

"Please," Harry said, placing the fabric over Voldemort's eyes again. He could not do what he wanted to do, he could not dare, if Voldemort watched each and every act of his. His desperation must have been evident because Voldemort sighed and leaned forward to let Harry blindfold him.

And when Harry placed the third strip over Voldemort's mouth, pushing slightly to part the lips open, there was no protest. Perhaps Voldemort had resigned himself to Harry's ineptitude and nervousness, and wanted it over with as soon as possible. Harry took his clothes off hastily.

Robbed of speech and sight, and of movement, Voldemort was Harry's then. Harry took a shaky breath and dared press a soft kiss to the sharp angle where the collar bone met a shoulder. Harry kissed his way across from there to Voldemort's neck, and then upwards slowly across the prominent apple of his throat, and then further upwards to his strong chin. He then placed his fingers on Voldemort's arms and splayed his body over Voldemort's, encasing him completely, earning another set of jerky attempts to throw Harry off, before Voldemort brought his responses under his control. Harry had never wanted to touch and taste this badly before. His lips and fingers and tongue fought to reach the same places, and he could not determine if he liked the scent and taste of sweat at Voldemort's collarbone more than that of his navel. Oh, there was an expanse of skin clamouring for his attention, and there were nooks and valleys hollowed out fine by bones, and there were lips, forced open by Harry's impromptu gag, and Harry could have spent a lifetime sucking on them and licking away the saliva that collected at the corners, and he could have spent a lifetime listening to the half-strangled noises Voldemort made, and he could have spent a lifetime feeling against his skin aborted attempts to clasp and clutch.

His grip turned fiercer, his teeth came to mark skin, his cock left wet trails of pre-ejaculate over Voldemort's skin, and his breathing harshened into pants. When Harry finally dared touch the knees and trailed his fingers upwards, along the smooth skin of the inner contours of parted thighs, he was answered by Voldemort arching his back, throwing his neck into sharp profile, winding his legs about Harry's waist, and then shifting them slowly upwards to Harry's shoulders, splaying himself open to Harry's gaze and touch. Harry dared look, and he then carefully touched, first trailing his fingers down the warm skin, spreading the liquid trails evenly over the satiny surface. It was not enough, so he brought his fingers to his mouth and laved them with his saliva. Then he encased another man's cock for the first time in his palm, and Voldemort's torso arched taut off the bed. Harry admired his flexibility.

It was alien, compared to all of Harry's experiences before. It was familiar, in that he knew exactly how to pull and tug, in that he knew exactly how to ease and soothe, in that he knew how to read Voldemort's flesh as if it were his own. He bent forwards to attempt what a few girls had done for him before. He bent forwards to press his lips to that flesh, and it elicited wild responses from the body beneath him. He brought his hands to hold down Voldemort by the hips, to keep him still while Harry learned to map the texture of his flesh with his lips and tongue. He was clumsy and he wondered how girls learned to be good at it. He noticed the concavity of Voldemort's stomach turning sharper, he noticed the stuttering breaths that Voldemort strove to even out, he noticed the veins standing prominent in Voldemort's thighs and clasped wrists. He moved his hands upwards, boldly, and gripped the taut, brown nipples standing prominent against the pale chest, and he tugged them fiercely, pulling upwards towards him, just as he closed his mouth about Voldemort's cock and worked his tongue as best as he could. The body beneath him doubled up as Voldemort sought to reduce the sudden blaze of sensation, as he arched up into Harry's hands and mouth, as his thighs went rigid about Harry's neck. When he fell, Harry dragged the jar of petrolatum across to him and pried the lid open. He dipped his fingers into the viscous liquid and brought them to rest at the entrance to Voldemort's body. Flesh quivered about his fingers, as Voldemort thrashed through his orgasm. Harry pushed forward, and warmth gripped his fingers whole. He made a few shallow thrusts, and then replaced fingers with cock. Fear retreated when he saw how Voldemort pushed to meet him, when he saw how Voldemort's legs tightened in pleasure about him. He did not last past a few thrusts, driven to his fall by how Voldemort's body, still in the aftermath of the earlier orgasm, thrashed through Harry's thrusts, and a few more drops of ejaculate were wrung dry from the sensitised body.

They collapsed in an ungainly manner on the sheets. Harry pulled down Voldemort's legs from their perch on his shoulders, dragged the sheets over them, and splayed his fingers over Voldemort's chest, before settling down beside him. When Voldemort had caught his breath, he whispered a word to vanish the gag away from his mouth. Harry winced when he saw the cracked corners of the lips.

"I will keep the others on, if you wish," Voldemort said then, licking the corners of his lips to soothe the sting.

Harry pushed himself up on an elbow and looked down at Voldemort. There were streaks of red all over his body, testifying to where Harry had placed his mouth and nails, testifying to where Harry had clutched and gripped. There was sticky liquid drying on his stomach and chest, testifying to the exertion of their passions. Harry's eyes were drawn to the hands bound together, though the fingers that had been convulsively clenched earlier were now flat and open in relaxation. His gaze moved upwards to the angry redness around the nipples that he had treated none too gently. He bent forward to press kisses to the red circles and Voldemort's body trembled at the sensation.

"That was a novel way to orgasm," Voldemort said hoarsely, and Harry blushed.

"What will you do if I untie the blindfold?"

"I will look at you."

"What will you do if I free your hands?"

"I will touch you."

Harry's breath caught and he hastily undid the knots. Voldemort blinked as the brightness in the room seared his eyes, and then he turned to watch Harry. He brought his hands up, to rub circulation back into the red circles about his wrists.

"This explains your many conquests," Voldemort noted.

"I have never done anything of this sort before," Harry said distractedly, wondering why he had not noticed before how limpid and lustrous Voldemort's gaze was. He reached across clumsily to drag his fingers down the side of Voldemort's face. He had wanted this for so long. He wanted this again. He knew, then he knew, that this was in the core of him, and he had known that earlier too, though he had tried to stay in denial, though he had tried to explain away using Voldemort's rationale. Once was once, and once was not enough, not to last him for the rest of his life.

His throat caught on a sob, and his voice was breaking, as he babbled, "It will not pass! I can't not see you this way."

Voldemort gripped Harry's fingers that had been trailing over his skin, and said, "Then don't."

When Harry stilled, Voldemort turned to face him properly, and assessed him. Then nodding to himself, he leaned forward, carefully, as if not to spook Harry, and cupped Harry's cheeks firmly. Harry's eyes widened in shock just as Voldemort closed the distance between them with a kiss that was every bit as mechanically accurate as it was unyieldingly dominant. Harry's lips were coaxed open, and his mouth surrendered easily, wantonly, to Voldemort's seeking. He had been kissed many a time before, and he had generally considered it a necessary precursor to sex, but this was different. This was a beginning and an end all in itself, as Harry yielded himself to lips and tongue and teeth. This was the first kiss where he experienced pleasure through only the act, without having to tie it to more in the offing. When Voldemort shifted away, Harry sighed in abandon.

"Perhaps there is hope, after all," Voldemort said wryly, eyes glinting in amusement that did not come across as mocking. "I do despair when a man doesn't enjoy kissing."

"Have you known many men like that?" Harry asked curiously, jealously.

"My bedpost is quite pristine, compared to your notched one," Voldemort teased him, and Harry spotted a smile lurking at the chapped corners of Voldemort's mouth. "I was twenty when I took a lover. You were fifteen, if I remember the reports correctly. Such a prodigy."

Twenty? It must have been the man Narcissa had spoken of. The man who had died in Knockturn alley. The man who had made love to Voldemort, just as as Harry had, on red silken sheets.

"You weren't curious about sex?" Harry wondered. During his teenage years, that had been all that anyone had been curious about.

"I had the opportunity given to me, before, unasked for," Voldemort said plainly. "I hadn't cared for it then. I had been rather too young to appreciate the subtleties, I suspect. It took me a while to forget that episode."

Harry sat up and faced Voldemort, aghast. "Someone tried to molest you?"

"More farce than tragedy. Mrs. Cole, the matron of the orphanage where I grew up," Voldemort said, and there was still a tinge of ironic amusement in his gaze. "She had been drunk, and I had been an exceedingly handsome specimen, by her standards. I think the episode sufficed to deter me from sex and women for a long time. Admittedly, my ability to sexually appreciate women was weak in the first place."

Oh. That explained a great deal about the Pensieve memories Dumbledore had shared with Harry. The boy in those memories had hated that matron. Harry squirmed. The Dursleys had been terrible, but they had not crossed certain boundaries. He was grateful for that. Even if Voldemort called it more farce than tragedy, Harry wondered if it had had deeper effects. It had made Voldemort decide to choose celibacy for years, during a time when his peers must have been obsessed by and engaged in sexual relationships.

"I wasn't any good at relationships," Harry muttered, thinking about how Voldemort had called his bedpost full of notches. "There were random nights of sex with random girls. That doesn't really mean anything, you know. I don't even remember most of their names."

Hermione had told him that he should be ashamed about that.

"I suppose I have often envied those who could engage in sex casually, without the encumbrances of emotion and affection. It seemed to me that what I found difficult to navigate, they found easy," Voldemort said thoughtfully, bringing his fingers to curiously trace the grotesque scars that Cho's mad idea had left on Harry's body. The scar tissue was raised from the surrounding skin, and Harry found Voldemort's touch, sensitive as it went skittering over the scars, strangely erotic.

"It isn't easy," Harry said sadly, thinking to his long and lonely years. "It is only that when you have given up trying to navigate relationships, when you have given up trying to find a connection, you don't really think about anything except sexual fulfillment."

It had been impossible to even try after he had realised where he had found a connection, after he had realised how futile it was to hold out for a reciprocation.

Voldemort had yielded his obstinacy, for now, at least where sex was concerned. Harry bit his lip thoughtfully. Based on what Voldemort said, based on what Harry knew, Voldemort was not the sort to throw him out after a single night's passion. And Voldemort trusted him, at least a little, to have let Harry do what he had done.

"I am amenable," Voldemort said sleepily, tugging the sheets closer to his neck. "Here, in my home, where I can be sure of my wards and privacy, I am amenable to your needs. Once a week, perhaps? I can bring you here every Friday night and take you to Camden on Saturday morning."

A pact of sex? Harry wondered what his life had fallen to. This was not what he wanted. This was not what he needed. He would make do. It was better than nothing. Six days of his cold and lonely life, spent awaiting and remembering a single day of mutual desire and passion; there could be worse outcomes. He thought of Minerva, again, alone and in mourning. He thought of Dumbledore, who had chosen to rest in Grindelwald's homeland. He thought of Voldemort, who had lost his lovers on the altar of his vision.

Intense unhappiness was easier to come by than most anyone realised.

"That suits me."

Harry was proud that his voice did not waver.

—


	7. Better the end than the beginning

When Harry woke in Voldemort's bed for the second time, he was alone, sore, and nursed a headache. It was not the same as the hangover he had nursed in the same bed, more than a decade ago, after what had happened to the snake.

"Good morning," Voldemort shouted from the hall, and Harry could smell the familiar Harrods' brew.

He rubbed his eyes tiredly and made his way to Voldemort. The man was already dressed, and there were spots of colour on his cheekbones and dew-drops on his robes.

"Went out?" Harry asked.

"A morning ritual," Voldemort said easily, nodding to the second cup of coffee that was on the table. "The moors beckoned at dawn and not even your warmth sufficed to draw me away from ritual."

Harry glanced out at the moors. They looked cold and inhospitable as always, but Harry could imagine how perfectly the bleakness would complement Voldemort in the pale light of the rising sun over the craggy rocks. Oh, how fortunate had Harry been, the night before, to lay waste to that pristine body, to ravage until the neediness of years eased. He sighed and picked up the cup of coffee.

"I will take you back home after breakfast," Voldemort decreed. "I am ravenous, after yesterday's activities and my walk today."

"I can cook," Harry said, feeling slow and numbed.

They had had only a pact of sex. Was breakfast included too? He felt hysterical, thinking of how Hermione had talked about hotels that offered complimentary breakfast to their lodgers. Only, this was not a hotel, and Harry very much wanted Voldemort to not tire of him, and he was a decent cook, thanks to Petunia. The way to a man's heart was through his stomach. That is what Molly believed and was fond of telling them all.

"So can I," Voldemort said nonchalantly. "Why don't you restore yourself to a modicum of presentability?"

Oh, Voldemort thought he looked terrible. Harry opened his mouth to explain that he was only so disreputable-looking in the morning because of how decadent their night had been, but that might make it sound as if Harry had never had sex. It was true, in a manner, that he had never had sex like this.

He was about to explain all of this, and what came out of his mouth was, "I was hoping you could fuck me before breakfast."

Voldemort had been deftly leafing through official-looking correspondence, but his fingers slipped and he cursed fluently in French under his breath as he bent to pick up the fallen scrolls. Then he looked up at Harry, and there was intensity banked in his gaze, and he said softly, "Make yourself presentable, Harry. Then I will be delighted to fuck you."

Harry stood still for a moment, shocked by what he had asked for. He had known, that in the long run, Voldemort would probably ask to fuck him. Nothing about Voldemort screamed submissive in the bedroom or outside. That kiss had proven Harry's suspicions right. It was just that Harry had not expected to deal with it so soon. Voldemort had not brought it up. Harry had delivered himself on a platter. He cleared his throat and was about to wheedle his way out, to postpone this to their next encounter, when he saw the mischief lurking in Voldemort's eyes.

"Do be a dear boy, Harry," Voldemort said in a sing-song voice. "Take your bath and come to my bed. I love plucking cherries."

Harry was fairly sure that it was sexual innuendo, but he could not quite figure out what it meant. So he just made his way to the bathroom to shower. The bar of soap smelled of the moorlands and of the heather, of Voldemort's threadbare robes. The water was warm and sensitised his skin. The large, open window that looked out to the moors brought a cool, morning breeze to lap at Harry's skin. Voldemort must be an exhibitionist, or miles away from his neighbours, to have such a large window in his bathroom. Harry thought it was likely the second. Nothing about Voldemort hinted at exhibitionist tendencies. He remembered quite well how the man had asked Harry to step into the kitchen so that he could get dressed, during their miserable episode here after the death of the snake. Yet, when Harry had touched him, everywhere, in every way, Voldemort had not shirked away from Harry's eyes or fingers or mouth. Thinking of that left Harry awash in arousal. He stepped out of the bath and dried himself, before walking to the bed. His fingers were trembling. He could barely see straight. Everything was too vibrant, too amplified.

"I have an excellent idea," Voldemort announced, walking in, and then walking about Harry. Harry felt as if he were a cloth bale at an auction, as if he were on a trader's block while canny buyers inspected him from every angle.

"Drop the towel," Voldemort ordered then. There was no give in his voice. Harry shuddered and obeyed, and the exposure made him colour in embarrassment and need. How had Voldemort made it look so easy?

"On the bed with you," Voldemort said. "Kneel in the middle. I will arrange you."

Voldemort's idea of an arrangement consisted of something that seemed to Harry to be lifted from an extremely kinky Japanese pornography magazine. He pressed Harry's face to the sheets, and then pushed Harry's legs apart, and then placed his palm at Harry's tailbone, pushing him down inexorably, into a position that reminded Harry of a frog.

"Bring your hands to your kneecaps," Voldemort said, streaking his fingers down the line of Harry's back from the nape of his neck to the flesh of his perineum.

"Do you know why I chose this?" Voldemort asked.

Harry could hear the telltale sounds of disrobing. He gulped and said, in a voice bleeding with desire, "Because you wanted to make me feel exposed?"

"Because I wanted to make you feel contained," Voldemort corrected him, as he draped himself over Harry, and his legs cradled Harry's, and his head was at the crook of Harry's neck, and his torso enveloped Harry's. He brought his hands carefully to weave into Harry's fingers at both sides. Then he stretched his lower body, precisely, so that his cock was poised at Harry's arsehole, tantalisingly present. "You have waited a long time to be safely held in a lover's strength, haven't you? You have yearned to feel owned, to surrender your fears to someone you trusted."

Harry tried to shake his head in denial, but a sob choked him, and when Voldemort pressed his lips to Harry's ear, he felt tears in the corners of his eyes. "Please," he whispered, in a voice he could not recognise as his anymore, torn as it was by yearning. Everything had been hollow and devoid of meaning, and only the mundaneness of life had kept him grounded. He had sought, desperately, to surrender a while, to be held and not mocked for his fears, to be cherished if only for a few hours. Voldemort's body clamped about his, and when Voldemort entered him, there was only surety and respite.

Hermione often talked about the meaning of life, about her purpose. Harry had never been lofty-minded like her. Each of Voldemort's thrusts deeper into his body, the smell of their sweat and need, the firm grip of Voldemort's palms over his own, the unending contact between their bodies: all came together, and for the first time in his life, he saw something beautiful beyond the mundane, exalted despite the suffering and the grief.

—

For all that Voldemort was finely tuned to Harry's sexuality and needs, he did not breach their original pact. He was courteous and even displayed a measure of consideration, but he did not offer anything more beyond their Fridays. At times, Harry was able to lure him into a second round of sex on Saturday mornings, but that was as much as Voldemort let their encounters stretch.

Harry lived for the Fridays. It was less shameful to accept that than he had feared. How could he loathe himself for grabbing whatever happiness was offered him in life?

"Who is it?" Narcissa asked, on one Monday morning in late December, when it was just her and Harry in the deserted shop, sorting through the inventory together.

Harry was sure that Ron and Hermione suspected he was seeing someone. Neither of them had asked, being tactful, knowing Harry's history of disastrous one-night stands and failed dating attempts. Narcissa, on the other hand, was not renowned for her tact.

"I don't want to jinx it," Harry muttered, not looking at her.

"I have a son your age," Narcissa said quietly. He looked up at her then. There was a strange sadness on her features. "He is wiser than you, when it comes to love. He has never given me cause to worry on that front. I worry greatly about you."

"I am only your employer," Harry said, feeling awkward.

He had taken to Narcissa, and somehow had substituted her for the mother he had not known. Molly mothered him greatly, and he was grateful for that, but somehow Harry felt closer to Narcissa. They were both introverted. Perhaps that was the reason why Harry was drawn to her more.

"I worry greatly about you," Narcissa stated. She reached across to place a dainty hand on his forehead, as Petunia had sometimes done to check if Dudley had a fever.

"It is nobody worrisome," Harry said, embarrassed and shy. "I mean, it has been going on for longer than even Gwenog. I am okay too."

It had been more than four years of sex on Fridays.

Voldemort continued his life in his usual manner, deftly negotiating and scheming, building on strong foundations aided by Griselda.

They had two new holidays every year. One to celebrate the marriage, and one to mourn Dumbledore. Voldemort had not stopped wearing a black mourning band on his thin wrist, and the sleeves of his robes had been shortened to display that to the watching public. It had made the Witch Weekly call him the best-dressed widower of their times.

"There is grey in your hair," Narcissa noted.

Harry sighed. He had noticed that too, when brushing in the mornings. Still, he was faring better than most: Ron's waistline and the frown-lines on Hermione's face seemed worse. Rose and Hugo were lovely children, and Harry adored them so, but they had prematurely aged their parents and put a strain on their marriage that Harry feared was turning irreparable.

"If you want more, you should ask him," Narcissa said then. Startled, Harry looked up at her to find her blushing crimson.

"He took Viktor to Bulgaria every year for Christmas celebrations with his mother," she said, still blushing. "He isn't incapable of more, you know. We only get what we ask for, Harry. You are trying to make do. You are trying to cling to hope, to your maybes. I know that it is easier to never ask, so that you don't have to face a no. As you grow older, you will turn bitter. You will resent him and you will resent yourself. You will spurn your friends and their happiness. You will find life less joyful. It is an easy trap to fall into, Harry. You built a thriving business out of nothing, didn't you? You rebuilt your life after Cho, didn't you? Don't let this be what defeats you."

"Narcissa-" he shook his head wearily and sat back on his haunches. "If I ask, if he wants nothing more, I cannot-"

The sex was fulfilling. How could he explain it? To go back to Camden, to the local where the crowds were getting younger and younger with each year, to the Weasleys where there were grandchildren aplenty, to Hogwarts where Minerva and Snape were trying to fill in the void Dumbledore had left - Harry's life looked empty without the once-a-week assignations with Voldemort. In his twenties, Harry might have railed at it, might have the courage to walk out with his head high and to rebuild. Now, he was tired.

"I have known him all my life," Narcissa said, hesitating, as if she was trying carefully to pick her words. "He lost two lovers. In his place, I would be frightened to condemn another to that risk again."

"The first one was very bad, wasn't it?" Harry asked.

He had seen the clues scattered in Voldemort's mannerisms and belongings. The decor of the house, the robes Voldemort refused to put aside for newer ones, the grief on Voldemort's face somedays when he returned from his long walks alone on the moors, the hesitancy Voldemort showed when Harry first pressed a kiss to his forehead; Harry was no expert on long relationships, but he had seen enough to weave it all together.

"Yes, theirs was a grand affair of passion and emotion," Narcissa said delicately. "He was a different man, one could say, in his lover's company. I see the same potential now, Harry, if not a stronger one."

"What do you mean?"

"I have known him all my life," Narcissa said, with a sad, wise smile. "Ask him, Harry."

—-

Harry did not dare ask Voldemort. So he continued with their Fridays. One night, in February, when there was snow on the moors as a white blanket, Voldemort left him in the bedroom and said, "I must wash, Harry, unless you have no opposition to smelling Bella's Italian perfume."

"I have severe objections," Harry told him plainly. Bellatrix's perfumes smelled like wildflowers. They gave him a headache whenever he smelled them on Voldemort.

"Such a demanding young man," Voldemort lamented, making his way to the bath.

Not young anymore, Harry wanted to say, but he kept his quiet. Snooping about in Voldemort's bedroom was a fruitful exercise that kept him amused anyway. There were usually books strewn across. Oh, there was a large, gilded book lying open on the pillows that day. Harry's eyebrows shot up when he realised what the book was. He dragged it to him and started reading, confused by Voldemort's choice in bedtime reading material.

"How can one be warm alone?" Voldemort breathed over his neck, as he bent to read over Harry's shoulder. He smelled of the moors, of his milled soap, and of a clean, sharp scent that Harry associated with his skin.

"If two lie together, then they have heat," Harry read aloud, smiling fondly at Voldemort's habit of poking his head into whatever Harry was reading. "Oh, I had not expected that you would keep a Bible so close to your bed."

"Afraid that my sins will make Leviticus implode and incinerate me?" Voldemort asked, shifting around to lie beside Harry. "The Bible was a gift from my late, lamented spouse. He gave it to me on our wedding day. It came in ghastly fuchsia wrapping, with a sparkly bow, and was delivered by that showy fowl he called his pet."

Startled by that, Harry opened it at the beginning, and sure enough, saw Dumbledore's beautiful loopy cursive. It brought tears unbidden to his eyes. He had never finished mourning the man. None of them had, Harry knew. The marriage that the Headmaster had undertaken to save their world was becoming the stuff of legends. There had been books written about it. There had been songs composed about it, both by the mainstream artists like Warbeck and by even alternative bands like The Freakensteins that Ron was fond of.

And look, how Dumbledore had been kind and true to himself, even when undertaking that marriage that had given him no pleasure. He had given Voldemort a wedding gift.

"At least he gave you something," Harry pointed out, defending his late mentor.

"Blood for a Bible," Voldemort said peaceably, arranging the sheets over himself and then sprawling a leg on Harry's lap, demanding a kneading in a manner not entirely dissimilar to Hermione's kneazle. Harry put the Bible aside carefully and then began massaging the tight calf offered. Was the Ministry that stressful? Voldemort was wound up like a spring when he returned on most days.

"I run a shop," he muttered. "I am on my feet all day. I don't get myself into this state, though. What are you doing?"

"Saving our world, everyday, in every way," Voldemort replied mischievously. "That is more arduous than selling mink furs, Harry."

"Try telling Narcissa that," Harry retorted, thinking about how she sighed and remonstrated with Harry about her workload whenever he suggested a new import line.

"She was a spoiled brat of a child," Voldemort reminisced. "Hung to her father's coattails and demanded to be present at meetings. This had been the heady days of our revolution; very little at those meetings was appropriate for little girls and their pigtails."

That surprised a laugh out of Harry. It was serious. Torture and terrible things had likely gone on at those meetings, he suspected. Yet, the image of Voldemort, forbidding and stern, ordering out a little girl who wore her blonde hair in pigtails, was hilarious.

"Oh, your meetings these days are appropriate for children?"

"Despondently so," Voldemort sighed, placing a long, perfectly-shaped limb to shield his eyes from the misery of reality. "We serve non-alcoholic drinks, these days. Our orgies have faded into myth."

Shaking his head in bewilderment, as he was not sure if Voldemort was being truthful, Harry stretched himself beside the man and blew the candle out.

Then, because Harry was thinking about what Narcissa had said, he asked softly, "Four years?"

"Four years and six months," Voldemort corrected him, slipping out of bed, walking to the large chest of drawers beside the window to extract thick, red, woollen blankets. "You are shivering. You should have told me that it was cold."

Voldemort's consideration was reassuringly commonplace in their interactions that it spurred Harry to ask, "Do you wish, sometimes, if there was more than Fridays?"

Voldemort draped the blankets over Harry and tilted his head as he looked down at Harry, assessing.

"I know that you do," Voldemort said finally, after long moments of silence.

He plucked out the candle at the wick, to leave them in darkness. Harry did not say anything more. Perhaps that was Voldemort's way of saying no. He gritted his teeth, cursing Narcissa's stupid optimism. He felt Voldemort's body slipping in beside him, under the heavy blankets.

"It has not been easy," Voldemort murmured, after Harry had lain there contemplating his life for nearly an hour.

He had thought that Voldemort had fallen asleep. The man was quick to do that, particularly after sex or after a long bath.

He wondered if he should press, if he should ask the questions that plagued him, but he hesitated.

—

It was midday, and he was helping a young girl in her early twenties pick her bridal gown, when Narcissa stepped out of his floo, looking pale and shaken. Harry rushed to her, abandoning his customer.

"Yes?"

"There was an attack at the Ministry," she said. There were sirens of the Aurors blaring outside in Knockturn. The young customer panicked and rushed out before Harry could ask her to stay safe inside. He looked at Narcissa.

"Close the shutters," she ordered briskly. "We should stay here until it calms down."

"Is he all right?" Harry asked, obeying her blindly, closing up the shop, throwing down the shutters, activating the wards of protection.

"He was at the Wizengamot elections," she said, pouring herself a cup from Harry's coffee pot, though she despised coffee. "My son alerted me and I came to you."

"Why?"

"You are the last link, aren't you?" Narcissa asked, and there was a knowing in her gaze that made Harry flinch. "They cannot kill him unless they kill you first. They will come here."

"Who are they?" Harry asked, just as he realised he had left his wand on one of the bales of fabric in the backroom. He had to keep talking. She was a clever woman though. She shook her head and raised her wand.

"They have your husband," he guessed, wildly. "That must be why."

"I love him," she confirmed. "I made a deal, Harry. They will come here. They will remove the scar. You won't be harmed. I made them promise."

Green flared the Floo. Harry, instinctively, moved to shield her from whatever it brought. It brought men in dark robes, their faces obscured by long hoods. He tried to think, he tried to focus on his magic, to summon his wand to him, he tried to rack his brains for what Dumbledore would have done.

Ropes came to bind him, and Narcissa's hand was heavy despite its lightness on his forehead, as she held back his hair to reveal the scar most everyone had forgotten about after the marriage.

"You will not hurt him," she told the men. Harry wondered how she could be so foolish, and he was proven right when one of them hit her, backhanded. Flesh seared and burned as the men chanted and placed the tips of their wands at his scar. Rage woke in him, foreign yet well-remembered from his fifth year. They were drawing the horcrux to the fore. Harry gritted his teeth in pain, and tried to rear back from their hands, but he was held immobile.

"Please," he begged, though he knew not for what. Was it to end the pain, unendurable? Was it to leave him be, freak of one and a half souls that he was?

"You are hurting him," Narcissa was saying, and she sounded tearful. "You promised!"

Then she screamed. Harry's fear and rage mixed with that of the horcrux. Intense hatred surged in him, the likes of which he had not experienced before, even after Sirius's death, and he roared in fury. He heard men shouting, and Narcissa screaming, and he saw white light flashing on the insides of his eyelids.

—-

The moors were bleak and desolate, though the raging seas below the craggy rocks lent a touch of disturbance to the calmness that pervaded otherwise. Harry picked his way through the rocks, as nimbly as a goat, and he knew where he was going.

There, lying on a spread of heather, clad in robes of red silk, was Voldemort, looking younger and less burdened. There was a smile on his lips that brightened when he saw Harry. There was something strong and enchanting about the emotion in his eyes. Harry felt whole.

"You saved me!" Harry crowed, as he fell beside Voldemort, and took his mouth for a deep kiss.

When they parted, Voldemort brought his hands to grip at his throat, convulsively, and Harry was holding to his shoulders, shaking him, and the world gave away.

—

When Harry woke, he woke in a clean bed at St. Mungo's, and there was Ron and Hermione at his bedside.

"Harry!" she said, sobbing inconsolably.

Ron told him that he had been admitted, in a comatose state, to St. Mungo's, after the Aurors had broken down the shutters of his shop, after they had found Narcissa sitting there on the floor, with Harry's head in her lap, crying and in shock, with corpses sprawled bloody around her.

Her son had taken her home. Ron had heard nothing of her afterwards. Harry hoped that she was all right.

"Did they find her husband?"

"He will live," Ron said darkly. "He was barely alive when Snape found him. He had been tortured badly. I've never seen Snape look that shocked, as when he did when he rescued the man."

"Who was it?"

Hermione spoke softly, uncertainly, "Terrorists. Rebels. Reformists. A large and well-coordinated organisation, from the looks of it. They had strong Muggle collaborations, from what the Ministry grapevine says. There will be a purge, the grapevine says. The Aurors are questioning everyone they suspect. They have five weeks. Otherwise they say that harsher measures will be taken…they say that there have been long meetings of the Death Eaters, for the first time since the marriage."

"Do they know why I was attacked?"

"Nobody knows yet," Ron replied. "They think it is because you were more accessible than Snape. Snape and you were the reasons why Dumbledore married. If one of you were harmed, if they found a way to blame Narcissa for it, it would foment a rebellion."

—

There was deja-vu wrapping Harry tight in its embrace, when on a dark and stormy night, Voldemort came to see him.

"I dreamed of you," Harry whispered, thrusting his hand out, trying not to weep when Voldemort clasped it tight in his own.

Voldemort looked sombre, as he bent to press a kiss with his chapped lips to the inflamed scar on Harry's forehead.

"Do I still have it?"

"My soul is difficult to displace, particularly when it adores its temple so," Voldemort said wryly.

"Not a container anymore?" Harry asked, wishing that the drugs to alleviate pain that coursed through his system did not blur his reality so.

"You have always been more."

"How many Fridays have I missed?"

Voldemort laughed, and it was a sad sound that did nothing to unburden the tightness in Harry's heart.

—

His flat in Camden had grown too small for him. He was in his narrow bed again, being waited upon hand and foot by Ron and Hermione, and by Rose and Hugo. Molly bustled in and out, with food in quantities to feed an army.

Minerva came too, once, from her self-imposed exile at Hogwarts. She was dressed in black and carried a funereal pall with her into the room. Harry cringed on seeing the cavernous pits beneath her eyes, the sallowness to her skin, and the stoop to her shoulders.

"He wouldn't want this for you," he blurted out.

"He wanted Grindelwald. I was only ever a spare," she said crisply, and then immediately winced at her unusual candidness.

Harry reached out to grip her hands and said earnestly, "He loved you. He worshipped the ground you walked on. He baked tarts for you, and spoke of you all the time in those later days. He knew how disturbing his obsession with Grindelwald was. He knew the distinction between that and his love for you."

When she wept, Harry held her close, awkwardly, uncomfortably. She did not return.

Narcissa came with her husband. She had a walking stick in one hand, and leaned on her husband on the other side. With her hair loose and her face carven hollow by sleepless nights, she looked a druid from an age past.

"I am glad to see that you are okay!" Harry exclaimed, trying to rise, but she shook her head and came to sit by him on the bed.

"I am sorry," she wheezed, and he noticed the hideous gash on her throat.

"They slit her throat, because she was trying to defend you," Lucius said then, intense anger making his voice tremble. "If you hadn't been found for an hour more, she would have bled to death."

She had been stupid, trying to negotiate with them for her husband's life and for Harry's life, instead of running straight to Voldemort. She could have at least warned her bloodthirsty sister who was one of the finest duellists of their times.

"I remember very little," she said hoarsely. "The Dark Lord ripped through my memories a tad too enthusiastically, not that I blame him."

Harry winced. He looked at Lucius and said earnestly, "Please take care of her."

"You are not firing me?" she asked, and it wrung his heart to see the hopelessness and failure on her features. She had tried to shield him, had been willing to die for him, and had tried to save him in a convolutedly stupid manner.

"I doubt he will have a business to return to if he fires you, my darling," Lucius said soothingly.

Harry had no liking for Lucius Malfoy, but they had her in common and he was glad that her husband adored her. As she turned to leave, Narcissa paused, turned back to look at him once again, and said, "Today is Friday, Harry."

—

Voldemort knocked before entering.

"I want to, but I doubt I can," Harry blurted out, when he saw Voldemort standing at the threshold. There was a weariness about Voldemort that made Harry hurt.

"I had been meaning to visit you," Voldemort said, taking his cloak off and draping it over the arm of one of Harry's dining chairs. "This time was convenient as I had already blocked it in my calendar."

Oh, Voldemort blocked time for sex in his calendar. Harry did not know if he found that sad or flattering.

"I shall make myself coffee," Voldemort declared, bustling off to the shelves where Harry kept Harrods' reserve blend.

Harry lay there quietly, listening to the telltale sounds of the grinding and the brewing. Voldemort came to him then, bearing two mismatched mugs on a tray that had a chink chipped off by one of Hugo's antics last month.

"Thank you," Harry said, propping himself up against his pillows and taking a hot mug carefully.

Voldemort did not sit across him in a chair, unlike his other guests. He hitched up his robes slightly and clambered onto the narrow bed to sit beside Harry.

"I'd advise you to buy a better bed, but I suppose it is not imperative now," Voldemort murmured, inhaling the aroma of his coffee and then carefully holding the mug away in his left hand, while he brought his right hand to pull Harry closer.

"Why?" Harry asked, tired of it all.

He did not desire more. He had been worn hollow and empty by desire. His wants had defined him for years, and there was little left of the man Dumbledore had wanted him to be. He felt less chipper than he had when recovering from Cho. He felt less wide-eyed and optimistic, and all he craved was a return to normality.

He just wanted to get back on his feet, to go to his shop, to the reins back from Narcissa, and to return to haggling with his customers about clothing prices. He only wanted to be healthy enough to go to Molly's for her weekend dinners, to go to Ron and Hermione's to play the referee in their slowly breaking marriage, to show Rose and Hugo that he would be always there despite what their parents decided. The Fridays would be there too. Voldemort was unlikely to retreat, just as he was unlikely to initiate progress. Voldemort was comfortable with the state of matters. Harry, too, in a roundabout way, had come to appreciate constancy and comfort. More seemed too strenuous to achieve.

"You shan't need to buy a new bed because mine suffices," Voldemort stated, sipping his coffee with ease, as if he were discussing something as mundane as the weather.

"On Fridays?"

"Everyday, if it pleases you."

"You are afraid that someone will try and kill me again," Harry remarked.

Voldemort wanted to keep him close. Now Voldemort was the only one who was powerful enough to protect Harry. Dumbledore had been there, once, and Voldemort had left Harry in his care.

"I can't deny that self-preservation is a strong motivation," Voldemort admitted. "There is more, however. Your famed empathy does not show you as much?"

"My empathy has been drained to the bottom by you," Harry muttered.

Four and a half years of Fridays, trying to bolster himself through the week for a few moments of safety and belonging, of cherishing and grace. He had not realised how drained he had become, a husk of himself.

And there were Ron's and Hermione's squabbles. And everything else Harry had seen over the years. Dumbledore had called Harry wholesome. He certainly did not feel anything close to that now.

"I have been careful with you," Voldemort pointed out defensively. "I have not neglected you. I have been amenable to your needs."

Harry cautiously placed his half-empty mug of coffee on the end-table. Then he looked up at Voldemort and said baldly, "I love you. I have loved you for a very long time. I enjoy sex with you and I am grateful that you indulge me. If that is what I can have, that is what I will have. I have made my peace with it."

"You said that you dreamed of me."

Harry frowned. Yes, he had said that. Voldemort had been in his dream, open and vulnerable, accepting Harry's devotion, reciprocating it, until he had clutched his throat and fallen in Harry's arms. That had been an odd dream.

"A bond of magic and sacrifice as ours," Voldemort said hesitantly, bringing Harry's hand into his own, and drawing Harry's fingers up to his throat, where there were grooves left behind by a chokehold. "A bond of magic and sacrifice as ours blurs the lines between dreams and reality."

"What happened?" Harry asked, alarmed, turning to look at Voldemort properly, frightened at the fading bruises about his neck. Voldemort's implacability and his adeptness at self-preservation had become Harry's constant, after Dumbledore's death.

"Time is what a wizard makes of it," Voldemort said, bringing his thumb to Harry's scar. "I stretched time, and I came to your shop, to find Narcissa dead, to find them trying to wrest the horcrux from you. In my meddling with time, without the use of a Time Turner, I had exhausted myself. They garrotted me, but I was lucky enough to be close to the horcrux, to be close to you, and my desperate gambit to channel the horcrux through you worked. I killed them all, healed myself, and meddled with time to restore matters to a state of acceptability."

"My God!" Harry exclaimed, clasping Voldemort by the shoulders. "Dumbledore's tarts must have messed with you! That was stupid! You nearly died!"

"I have never had a modicum of sense where you were involved," Voldemort said dryly, pressing a kiss to Harry's knuckles.

Harry thought back to the night when Nagini had been killed. He thought back to how Voldemort had clung to him, to keep him safe. He thought back to how Voldemort had watched him even when Krum had been alive. He thought back to how Voldemort had yielded, in slow inches, over the years to Harry's persistence. Voldemort had not wanted to render himself more vulnerable than he already perceived himself to be, where Harry was concerned.

"If they were going to try and kill me anyway, they must know that it will draw you out," Harry said weakly, wondering how he was daring again, wondering how he was foolish again to strive for the unattainable.

"You don't need to make your case again. Have me. You have been my north star, for years, and I have tried in vain to protect you from the implications of this truth. They know now. They know where to strike to bring me down. There is nothing else I can do except wallow in my failure to be discreet."

"I am hardly incapable of protecting myself," Harry said calmly, feeling purpose reignite again in him. "Don't wallow. Who knows? You may even enjoy sex more than just once a week."

"I suppose," Voldemort said in a begrudging tone, still wrapped up deep in his thoughts and fears.

Harry knew he should feel victorious. Had he not finally achieved what he had yearned for? Only, sitting there, on his cramped bed in his Camden flat, all he could think of was that he had been Voldemort's north star all the while he had spent languishing in despair about the futility of his dream. There was anger and sadness, festering in him, just as there was a strange sort of peace.

"Take me home, then."

—

His days that followed were quiet. Voldemort was rarely present, as he was occupied with hunting down informants and spies in the bosom of his government.

Harry read the Bible, reading passages that Dumbledore had marked and annotated in his loopy cursive. He took long walks on the moors, bundled up against the harsh elements in a red cloak that he had found in Voldemort's wardrobe. There were only the heather, the sea-spray, and sheep to keep him company.

He wrote to Ron and Hermione, to Rose and Hugo, and to Narcissa. He picked up his quill to write to Minerva, once or twice, and set it down in despair because he did not know what to tell her.

When he woke one night to find Voldemort slipping into the sheets beside him, warm after a bath, Harry cleared his throat, and placed his hand between Voldemort's legs. That elicited a sharp exhale and Voldemort rolled over atop him. It was a comforting, comfortable return to their ways of old.

As Harry lay there, panting, trying to catch his breath, Voldemort asked, "Perhaps we might reverse our places tomorrow?"

"You don't like that, do you?" Harry queried. Apart from that first time when Harry had taken it from him, Voldemort had never seemed particularly interested in that sort of arrangement.

"It is too late to obfuscate," Voldemort said sharply. "I have been trying to withhold less."

"I know," Harry said. "Don't you have to work tomorrow?"

"A holiday. It is the marriage anniversary," Voldemort muttered. "I had hoped to spend it with you, unless you desire me to leave you in peace for the day."

"No, no," Harry said soothingly. "I had forgotten. We can try it the other way around tomorrow, if that is what you want."

"Yes," Voldemort confirmed. Then he said in tone more unsure, "Try to be creative."

Oh, that was a dare. Harry smiled in the dark. He liked that easing in Voldemort's voice, that mischief which was revealing itself shyly.

—

They spent the day together, each occupied with his own correspondence. Harry watched how Voldemort seemed more restless as the hours passed, as the sunlight faded across the moors, as the clouds drew back to reveal a few stars. He set aside his half-written letter to Narcissa. Then he got to his feet and walked to Voldemort.

He was not twenty anymore. He was closer to forty than he liked. Hermione assured him that forty was the new twenty, but he was not sure about that. When he placed his hand heavy on Voldemort's shoulder, he saw wrinkles blooming at the crevices of his fingers. Voldemort's gaze held his uncertainly, reminding him very much of their first sexual encounter. He moved his hands to the lapels of Voldemort's threadbare robes.

"Take them off," he said, and his voice was surer than his heart.

"Yes," Voldemort said quietly, and suited word to action.

"I want you to fetch all of those robes," Harry ordered. "You will bring them to me."

Darkness and grief rose in Voldemort's eyes, but he nodded and returned with a handful of robes. He bent gracefully to place them at Harry's feet. Then he stepped back.

"Incendio," Harry whispered, and watched the finality settling onto Voldemort's face. They watched the fabric burn to cinders. Then Harry put the fire out.

"I will clothe you," Harry promised. Voldemort shuddered and Harry wondered if it was because of the cold. He nodded to the bedroom and watched Voldemort walk to the bed. He smiled as he saw Voldemort's look of surprise upon noticing the red silken straps hanging from the high ceiling.

"You don't need to bind me," Voldemort commented, touching the silk and testing it for give. "I am perfectly capable of holding any position you desire."

"You are sometimes terrible at reading me," Harry said ruefully, coming close and pressing a soft kiss to Voldemort's collarbone. He pushed the man down to the silken sheets, and sprawled himself atop the familiar body he knew better than his own.

He had once blindfolded and gagged the man, and bound him for good measure, so that he could explore without fear of censure. He knew better now. Why would he blindfold a man who looked at him with need? Why would he bind a man who let him move limb and torso as he pleased? Why would he gag a man whose only articulation was Harry's name?

When Harry worshipped him with lips and fingers, Voldemort arched into his touch, needful. When Harry placed his nails on the taut nipples and scratched them lightly, Voldemort threw his head back, held ablaze by sensation. Harry no longer felt diffident. He placed golden suction cups on each nipple and tugged them gently.

"Harry!"

Harry kissed him, fully, fiercely, pouring their need into a single nonverbal song of desire. Voldemort was melting in his hands, underneath him, shaking and sweating, eyes dark with desire. Oh, but he was not done. He lifted Voldemort's legs and placed the feet carefully in the straps, exulting in how that made Voldemort's stomach contract to stay balanced, exulting in how Voldemort threw back his shoulders to flatten his spine against the bed to hold himself stable. The man was flexible, Harry knew that. It was not something Harry could have managed, but he was confident in Voldemort's ability to manage. He brought fingers to the entrance to the body under him, and gently opened the flesh up. When he was satisfied that he would not harm, he withdrew his fingers and replaced them with a rod of gold. It was heavy in his hands as he held it, and he sympathised with the half-garbled cry Voldemort made when it settled deep within him. He dragged the links from the end of it to wind them to the clasps of the suction cups. Then he placed his hand on Voldemort's cock, making Voldemort's body arch into his touch, making him thrash as he sought to reach a position that ceased making his body sing in white pleasure, making him cry in vain as there was no such position achievable thanks to how crafty Harry had been.

"I could have written a book of psalms about you, just about you," Harry said honestly, enraptured by the vision of his lover, fettered in gold, spread wide and held suspended by red straps, sweating profusely onto their silken sheets.

Voldemort did not reply. He looked beyond the pale of reason. His eyes had fallen closed and there were tears trailing down his cheeks as he rode Harry's grip, seeking a reprieve, tormented by the gold against his prostate spreading him wide, and the gold against his nipples tugging in suction.

"Don't come," Harry cautioned him, as he watched the streaks of pre-ejaculate spread down his palm onto Voldemort's stomach.

When Voldemort had fallen from whispering his name to cursing profusely in French, Harry took pity. He removed the rod of gold from within his lover's body, and the pull made Voldemort shudder, and his ankles slipped out of the red silken bands to fall into Harry's lap with a thud that bore none of his usual grace of form and movement. Harry laughed at that, a tad smugly, and kissed Voldemort's trembling kneecaps. When Harry entered him, Voldemort strove in vain to grip him tighter, but his insides had been held open by the gold, leaving him incapable to control their rhythm. He strove to push back, to take Harry deeper, but his body was exhausted from holding that contorted position. He shook his head in helplessness and threw a hand over his eyes, letting Harry dictate their pace. Oh, they were not going to do it that way. Harry reached down to tug at the golden suction cups. Voldemort's hands fell to his sides and he shoved himself up to roll them over, still managing somehow to deftly keep Harry within him.

Harry caught his breath as Voldemort rode him, bending over to kiss Harry with little coordination, scattering kisses all over his face and neck, before Harry took hold of his neck and brought their mouths together with his right hand. He snuck his left hand between their bodies and removed the cups, and his heart caught as Voldemort sobbed awash in pleasure and sensation, and then he was coming, clenching uncontrollably and sending Harry crashing into orgasm. He held Voldemort to him, and let his sobs cease into a soft trembling. He dragged his hands soothingly down Voldemort's sides, trying to calm him down, in vain.

"All right?" Harry asked gently, after many minutes had passed, after Voldemort had quieted down, after his tears had dried on Harry's chest.

"All yours," was the peaceful reply. Voldemort sounded on the cusp of sleep. So Harry pressed a soft kiss to his forehead and reached across to put the candles out.

—

When Harry woke, he was alone in the bed. He did not bother making himself presentable. He found the red cloak, bundled himself up in it, and walked out to the moors. He knew where to go. His feet took him to the craggy rocks that watched the sea.

Voldemort was sitting there, hands clasped over his knees, knees drawn to his chin, dressed in Harry's robes, watching the sun rise through the grey clouds. When he heard Harry's steps approach, he turned to face Harry, and dawn broke through the grey skies, holding them both in its golden blessing for a long moment.

It had only taken them fifteen years to get here, Harry thought sadly, as he knelt on the rocks unheedful of complaints from his bones that had left behind their youth. He cupped Voldemort's face. Fifteen years of misery and silent longing, of distracting themselves as best as they could from the truth they had known all along.

"I hadn't dared," Voldemort said then, looking at him with eyes so bright and tender. "I hadn't dared, Harry."

"Neither had I," Harry replied softly, bending to surrender to Voldemort's kiss.

—

* * *

Thank you for reading :) Thank you for your patience with my writing style and canon deviations (shy wave)

If you prefer something longer with same pairing, come over to AO3 where I am more organized.

Connubium - (Latin rights)

How much less man - (Job 25:5) The Old Testament

What do you see? - (Zachariah 5:3) The Old Testament

Shylock's defence (The Merchant of Venice)

Quantum computing (Bulk Spin-Resonance Quantum Computation)- many of the modern quantum architectures are built using NMR.

A still, thin sound - (Kings 1. 19:11) The Old Testament

Iggy Pop - was doing punk rock before it had a name

Beatles - famous rock band that soared to heights on the McCartney-Lennon lyricist duo

What is man that you make much of him? - (Job 7:17)The Old Testament

Moses and the Promised land - (Exodus) The Old Testament

Amy Winehouse - renowned for her work in RB, soul, jazz genres. Partied a lot in Camden.

Vasil Levski - Bulgarian hero.

'I am Levski, the one and the same' - (Epic of the Forgotten) Ivan Vazov.

'And the storm blows them off like straw' - (Isiah 40:23) The Old Testament

'a broken shard, withering grass, a fading flower, a passing shade, a dissipating cloud, a blowing wind, flying dust, and a fleeting dream' - (Wisdom of Solomon 2:1) The Old Testament

'My days fly faster than a weaver's shuttle...Whoever goes down to Sheol' - (Job 7:1) The Old Testament

Sheol - where all the dead go, in the Old Testament (a la Hades)

Better the end than the beginning - (Ecclesiastes 7:8) The Old Testament

Again, if two lie together, then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone? - (Ecclesiastes 4:11) The Old Testament

Inspired by Unesanneh Tokef (part of the Rosh Hashanah liturgy).


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